Written By Donna Engle
Whether Terry Whye is creating ceramic boats to sail her through a difficult life transition or helping students form and decorate magic boats to carry them wherever they dream of going, she–and they–will be thorooughly immersed in the process.
The process that became her boat series began in the summer of 2006, when she faced the impending sale of her family home in Owings Mills. Conversion of the surrounding farms into shopping centers, parking garages and condominiums led Terry’s mother, Jenette Ports, to sell her home of 50 years.
“It was breaking our hearts,” Terry said. Knowing that the huge oak, poplar and hickory trees on the property would probably be cut down by the buyer, Terry took clay impressions of the tree bark.
Back in the studio of her Patapsco area home, Terry opened her sketchbook to the boat forms she had drawn over the years. She thinks about boats as vessels of transition. She used the clay sheets from the trees as molds to impress bark patterns on thinner sheets of clay that she would shape into the hulls of her boats.
“It was healing for me because I was saying goodbye to the trees I loved by making impressions and finding a way of preserving them by putting them into something that will last for a long time,” Terry said. The boats were featured in a recent exhibition at the Washington, D.C. Theological Society and in an exhibition now open at the Rehoboth, Delaware, Art League.
Some projects require study as well as introspection. Before she began fashioning round-bodied goddesses about 15 years ago, Terry had spent time on a Pueblo Indian reservation, where she was encouraged to explore her own European tribal roots.
She had studied European prehistoric art and Black Madonnas from around the world (the original goddesses were black; later wood-fired ones are blue, gray, brown or pink-purple). She thought about goddesses as divine archetypes and about seasonal cycles in the context of her lifelong love of nature. And she dreamed dreams that would infuse the work.
Before Terry began teaching her students to make magical boats, she read them The Owl and the Pussycat. She uses literature, poetry, mythology and music to bring out the children’s creativity. The students discussed where they would want the boats to take them. As they sculpted, they sang along to music with nautical themes.
“Terry has always approached creative projects that way,” said her sister, Kelley Gordon, a Carroll County Public Library associate.
“She might explore basket-making. Someone doing that might go to the store and buy basket weaving materials. But Terry would go out into the field, gather the materials, prepare them and then weave them into an amazing basket,” Kelley said.
None of Terry’s life experiences is lost. They reemerge, transformed, in her art. Her sculpture entitled, “La Brea, Queen of Heart,” a name drawn from the Spanish for “tar,” is a good example.
Terry was to participate in an exhibition of bonsai trees and containers at Baltimore Clayworks in 2002 and at the Washington, D.C. National Bonsai and Penjing Museum in 2003. At the time, she was grieving the death of her father in June 2001. She began sculpting a figure of an immense woman she had dreamed of a decade earlier, emerging from a tar bubble.
“I thought, if [the bonsai] could come out, like a tree of life, from her heart, that would be healing,” Terry said. The figure is a seated woman with an ample body, one hand upraised. Her face has no features. A bonsai tree emerges from her chest. The artist’s statement that accompanies the sculpture says Terry was “intrigued by the possibilities of a cascading bonsai gracing the landscape of an abundant great mother’s body.”
La Brea was fired in an oxidation kiln, which has no open flames. Coils radiate heat to fire the clay, slips (thinned clay used for coating ceramics) and glazes to a rich patina. The radiant heat transforms the clay into ceramic, but leaves little trace of the firing process on the object.
Terry has recently started firing many of her pieces in a wood kiln, which glazes the clay with fly ash and flame marks. “It gives them the ancient patina of rock stone,” she said, adding, “It is a unique surface quality you can’t really get any other way.”
Wood firing is not just building a fire and sitting back. It takes a team working in shifts around the clock to stoke the kiln every few minutes until the firing is done. Potters and sculptors receive kiln space in exchange for splitting and stacking wood and keeping the fire stoked. Terry is on several firing teams.
Terry’s mind soaks up inspiration for pottery and sculpture even when she is on vacation. On a trip to Maui in 2006, she and her husband Robert “June” Whye explored the shell-encrusted coral reefs and boulders lining the shore, swam with sea turtles and snorkeled beyond the reefs to listen to the whale songs.
What Terry saw, heard and photographed informed her next series of pots. At a recent gallery exhibition in Rehoboth, Delaware, she earned a juror’s award for a large wood-fired vessel that reflected the spiral shell imprints and water-worn patina she had seen on Maui.
Water is the inspiration for many of her ceramic workshops. She has conducted summer workshops for the Rehoboth Art League since 2003, and this year the workshops have titles such as “My Private Paradise” and “Magical Boats.”
Terry does not categorize pottery and sculpture as lesser and higher arts.
“Is it art versus function? Is it craft versus art? It’s all the same to me. I do not approach the making of a mug any differently than producing a sculpture when it comes to the aesthetics,” she said.
“A lot of people might look at a cup and [the creative considerations] would not be obvious, but when I’m teaching pottery making, my adult students are surprised to discover what it takes to form, decorate, glaze and fire a mug.”
Terry grew up in Owings Mills before the farms became subdivisions. Her youngest sister, Kimberly Ports Parsons, a Baltimore County elementary school library technology teacher, recalled that whether they were going out into the countryside with their watercolor sets to paint from nature, decorating cookies or modeling clay animals, “She’s a natural teacher. When we played together there was always an undercurrent of her teaching me something.”
Terry is the second of four children of the late Charles C. Ports, a broadcast engineer, and Jenette Ports, a homemaker who encouraged her children’s creativity. Michael Ports became a civil engineer, but his three sisters combined teaching with art. Terry became a sculptor, potter and teacher, Kelley uses her vocal music talents in presentations for the library and Kimberly is an educator, media specialist and published poet.
Terry’s art talent surfaced early, her mother recalled. At age 4 or 5, she was sketching animals that the family found on camping trips. She loved Play-Doh, but shaped the animals freehand. Jenette Ports arranged private art lessons for Terry.
Terry began giving private art lessons while she was still in high school, and taught art from 1972 to 1975 while earning a bachelor’s degree in visual and performing arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which she received in 1977. She has taken courses in education and fine arts at McDaniel College and Columbia Visual Arts College.
Terry opened Whye Clay Works in 1985. Since 1990, her sculptures have been shown in 75 group exhibitions and six solo exhibitions and featured in magazines such as Ceramic Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly and American Craft. Her work has received several awards.
Patrick Caughy, curator of the Washington Theological Society exhibition and an undergraduate classmate of Terry’s, described her work as technically skilled and true to her values. “When I ask her to be in an exhibition with me, I have confidence that whatever she offers will be genuine and wonderful,” he said.
Jenette Ports said her daughter seeks order in her environment. “Terry always liked to be in a serene-looking place. It seemed to upset her if something was not harmonious, if there was pandemonium in the house. She wanted things to be beautiful.”
Former student Susan Williamson, a potter and visual arts coordinator at the Carroll County Arts Center, said that Terry keeps an immaculate studio; pottery wheel pristine and tools clean, despite the fact that clay is inherently dirty. Classes go step by step through explanation of the process and the tools and the vast history of pottery, Williamson said.
“When I come away [from a lesson with Terry],” she said, “I feel like I have not only gained more skill, being able to push clay to new levels, but I have gained more history.”
