Barb Gregoire - Gallery Moab Featured Artist

Our featured artist for March is Barb Gregoire.  Barb's slightly whimsical and earthy Ceramic creations can be found in our gallery all year long.  She says her work is a journey as she constantly innovates and explores new ideas in her art.  Come see some of the new work she has unloaded from her kiln!  

While ceramic art is often discussed as the interplay of form and function -- and in that, Barb Gregoire’s work evokes a whimsical sensibility -- her focus is on the glazing process. She’ll often apply four to six glazes on a single piece, combining matte and gloss glazes in various combinations. “As a child, my father’s work as a geologist in Wyoming exposed me to the subtle colors and rich textures of crystal patterns in rocks,” explains Barb. “This is what I try to create in my glazes, knowing that pottery owes its existence to those mysteries locked inside the earth.” To this end, Barb fires her pieces in a Geil gas kiln capable of reaching 2600 degrees. “Using actual fire in a reduction atmosphere comes closest to simulating geologic process. Lucky for me, it only takes hours instead eons.”

While her artwork pays homage to nature, it is also engagingly human, a reflection perhaps of her journey as an artist. Barb, who grew up in the Big Horn Mountains, took her first ceramics class in 1977 at the University of Wyoming. Determined to learn from the best, she traveled the country taking classes and workshops from masters of the art: Jonathan Kaplan, Tom Coleman, Ian Curry and Julia Galloway among others. Barb ran the ceramics department at Colorado Northwestern Community College and founded Desert Sun Ceramics Studio here in Moab, which she later sold to pursue her own path as an artist. “Technique has always been important to me, but only as a way to develop my own style, which seems to keep changing over time.” What hasn’t changed is the enchanting nature of her pieces, each one worth turning over in your hands for the kinesthetic experience alone. “Using fire, water and earth to make art brings me great comfort about my place in the universe,” she says. “If others can feel this quality in my pottery, then my work is complete.”