Joanne Trestrail
Chicago native Joanne Trestrail lives in Hyde Park. Formerly a magazine and newspaper editor, she first took an interest in ceramics in the late 1990s, doing portrait sculpture in terracotta at the Koh-Varilla Guild on the city’s North Side and then taking throwing and hand-building classes at the Hyde Park Art Center for many years. She specializes in pieces made with elaborately coiled porcelain and stoneware clay, creating surface textures as she joins the coils and builds up the forms. Some of her work is suggestive of African pots, others of basketry, wasps’ nests, and other natural forms. Most pieces are unglazed.
The process is slow, but incrementalism has its own pleasures, she says. Unlike all-or-nothing dramatic gestures, gradual pile-ups have a stealthy take on time. They evolve beyond the sum of their parts to become something entirely new, yet readable, and, with luck, satisfying. Hence the short story, the friendship, the life, the coiled pot.
An admirer of the work of writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), Joanne is inspired (and reminded of her own ceramics process) by O’Connor’s essay about raising peafowl, “The King of the Birds”:
“It is hard to tell the truth about this bird. The habits of any peachicken left to himself would hardly be noticeable, but multiplied by forty, they become a situation. . . . I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply.”