Photos by Brandon Sullivan Terry Stone plays peekaboo with one of his "face jug" designs.

CERAMIST TERRY STONE TURNS RAW CLAY INTO UNIQUE HAND-CARVED OBJECTS

    For Terry Stone, it all started with a Jack Kerouac-inspired cross-country hitchhiking adventure in 1980.    
    By coincidence, Stone, a musician and painter, stumbled upon Arcosanti—an experimental community located in central Arizona—and landed a job as an apprentice at a ceramics studio. He quickly picked up the skills needed to stir clay and hand-carve pots and bells, and it wasn’t long before he was promoted to studio manager. In 1995, Stone decided it was time to move on and make his own creative decisions. “At some point, you have to fly,” he says. Today, the former vagabond lives in Superior, Ariz., where he runs a successful one-man business, T. Stone Ceramics.
    “I’ve carved tens of thousands of designs in over 20 years,” the 49-year-old boasts, explaining that he embellishes all his planters and bells freehand with a sharp razor-blade knife. Before he gets to this step, however, he starts from scratch by stirring water into clay until the mixture has a milkshake-like consistency. After removing sticks and rocks from the liquid clay, he pours it into molds to create asymmetrically shaped ceramic objects. He then carves the pieces and places them in a 2,200-degree gas-fired kiln; the results are one-of-a-kind stoneware.
    Inspired by folk art and nature, Stone lets his immediate surroundings guide his work. Recurring motifs on planters and bells include lizards, snakes, scorpions and the sun—all characteristic of the Arizona desert. Although scorpions are not popular with his customers, he refuses to stop incorporating them, since he believes they are fascinating creatures. “My feeling is that if you’re living in Arizona and you don’t like scorpions and spiders and such, then maybe you shouldn’t live here,” he says with a laugh.

Top: Terry Stone begins hand-carving a sun design with a utility knife. Bottom: Horned toads (foreground) and scorpions (background) are two of the motifs found on the nature-inspired planters and bells.

    Now that he has his own company, Stone enjoys having full control of his artistic direction. “I like having an amount of freedom to create what I want and having people appreciate it enough to buy it,” the artisan explains. “Even though my ceramics are decorations, I still try to make things that I personally have some feeling toward. I’m not just knocking out something.”
     Stone is especially fond of making sculptural ceramics such as so-called “face jugs.” In the South, this type of jug was used for serving whiskey; according to lore, the jugs’ mean faces would scare children away from drinking the hard liquor, he notes. Others believe that the grotesque faces protected the whiskey by warding off evil spirits. The jugs may look frightening, but that just makes Stone love them even more. “I think some art should be uncomfortable,” he states.
     One fan of Stone’s work is Southwest Gardener co-owner Amy Carlile, whose store carries the ceramist’s bells and planters. “It just has this organic natural feel,” she says of his work. “It really evokes the flavor of the Southwest.” Carlile loves his bells and the sounds they make, and reports that the Snake Bell has a tinkling-like pitch, whereas the Big Boy Bell gives off a rich bass tone. “I haven’t seen another bell like Terry’s,” she adds.
     Although the task of carving makes Stone’s hands ache at times, he finds that the artist lifestyle has its perks. “What I like about art is that you can share your ideas with other people who may accept them,” Stone relates. “To me, art is really no different from living or breathing . . . I don’t consider it work so much. Thank goodness—I hate working.”