Virginia Rigney: Ceramic Sculpture. Jewelry - rigneystudios

Virginia Rigney’s love of clay began with the making of a ceramic pig in the third grade. She still remembers that first magic of feeling a form come to life in her hands. Her forms have changed since then, but not the feeling.

She received her BA in Art from Stanford University as a painter. At the Richmond Art Center, the Center’s Director, Ernie Kim, taught her to throw on the wheel and the magic of clay reclaimed her. She continued wheelwork until the 1980’s when she became fascinated with extruded forms at Mission Clay in Fremont California. As a resident sculptor she worked with leather-hard eight-foot tall cylindrical sewer pipes. There she began a Sentinel Guardian series, which she has revisited through the years. “Passages”, a sculpture from that series, was installed in the California San Bernardino County Government Center in 1984.

Virginia’s current sculpture continues to utilize the initial energy and subtle movement of extruded forms. Her manipulation of the clay deepens the initial extruded birthing of the pipe. She finds that the forms like to relate to one another, as in a family. Her goal is to allow the invisible reality of a form to evoke a feeling, a sense of the spirit made visible.

Guardians and sentinels have been a reoccurring theme since the 1980’s when she was at a time in her life when she needed a protective guardian spirit. Recent work has become more representational. She says, “ Clay is a transformative process. I feel a co-creator present with me as I create these forms. They come intuitively and from some deep universal space within.”

While Virginia Rigney's vessels and forms are hewn from the elemental material of clay, they are enlivened by her sensitive depiction of the figure, poetic glaze use and expressive surface treatment. Each piece is a confident outcome of an impassioned internal process that has developed over many years.

Nancy Servis, Director of the Richmond Art Center

Ceramic historian and critic

The clay is fired to Cone 10 (2408F degrees). Salt is thrown into the heat of the kiln at the end of the firing cycle creating a chemical atmosphere that interacts with the clay surface and glazes, often in unpredictable ways. This unpredictability and change in the kiln (the fire of life) balanced by the meditative quiet strength of the clay form is at the core of Virginia’s work.