PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST: AMY KEPHART

This tea set made of porcelain is ready to be fired. The rough cut ornamentation is a facet of her pottery that sets it apart from others.

Amy Kephart's work is often inspired by nature.

Artists whose work can be used to pour tea don't always get the same respect other artists do, admits ceramic artist Amy Kephart.

"It has a lid on it. It must be a jar," she says. "To me, they're so much deeper."

Kephart creates vessels that pour, vessels that can be sipped from and vessels meant to be touched as well as looked at.

To her, the fact that her art is also utilitarian is good.

"Instead of just looking at it, you get to touch it, use it," she says.

The interests expressed in her work are architectural and the way the natural world looks under a microscope. Many buds and stems appear.

For an upcoming story about Kephart in "Ceramics Monthly," sculptor Dr. Alan Naslund calls attention to the female forms in her pottery.

All vessels have a foot, a belly, shoulders, a neck, Kephart says. "If you look at vessels, you can see the human body.

She works with a medium, clay, that has a memory.

Naslund also delves into her method of tearing the clay, suggesting the "scarring of life."

"Some people say my tears look painful," she says.

The cutting and tearing is a reference to the African practice of scarification, "how that was beauty," Kephart says.

"...I like to juxtapose the rough and the perfect."

Kephart's art requires the laying on of hands, requires getting dirty. Seated at a spinning wheel, she speaks of aligning the particles of clay on top of each other.

Kephart came to her obsession with pottery relatively late. She was studying painting when she took her first pottery class at Wichita State University in her late 20s.

She'd had to force herself to paint. But she couldn't get to the pottery studio fast enough.

"I fell in love with the wheel," she says.

Since then she has spent 3 1/2 years at the Kansas City Art Institute learning to become a ceramic artist, and more years doing graduate work at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. This will be her third year teaching ceramics at Southeast.

Kephart's first solo show will open Sept. 2 at Culver Stockton College in Canton. She also will deliver a museum lecture at the college.

She teaches a university studies class called Ceramics: A Metaphor. The students learn about the history of clay dating to antiquity and how to make vessels with their own hands.

She describes football players walking out of the class cradling a vases they made like babies.

In the beginning, people who take pottery classes are just mastering the dexterity required. "It's giving them confidence that they can get on the wheel.

She teaches them to solve problems that arise.

"Clay doesn't do anything on its own," she says. It's responding to what you're doing."

It is no accident that throwing pots often is included in psychological treatment. She can tell if a student is upset by the pots being created. But ultimately, throwing pots seems to have a calming, meditative effect on almost every one.

"Every part of your body and mind are focused on the clay," Kephart says.

At a time when computers have assumed much of the work that had been done by hand there is a huge movement back to crafts, to making pottery and jewelry and glass.

"We've taken our hands away by the use of computers and there's this need to work with our hands," Kephart says.

Once the vessel is made, glazing is a whole different process, one that requires good instincts and experience.

"You have to be able to read the glaze and know what to do," Kephart said. "I like to deal with that complex."

Glazing is very abstract. "You don't know what it's going to look like until it comes out of the kiln," Kephart says.

She has her students take notes, tracking the kinds of glaze they applied. "You have to understand them and how they work," she says.

At the same time, playfulness is one of the most important requirements of this or any art, Kephart says.

"Some of the best things have come out when I tell myself I'm here to play. Some of the best things come out of an accident."

A machine can make perfect pottery. "Beauty is in imperfection," she says.