Our Friend, Alice.
The Alice Woodruff Scholarship
**Our 24th Perspectives: Georgia Pottery Invitational is dedicated to Alice. Proceeds from the sale of her pottery will be put in to the scholarship fund.
Each year OCAF will have $1500 to support participation in a class and/or membership fees for community members in need of financial assistance. Read more about the scholarship in the beautiful essay by Ann Woodruff below.
This fund has been built in memory of Alice and will be used at the discretion of the executive director and Ann Woodruff.
If you could use financial assistance in order to participate more fully at OCAF, please reach out to beth@ocaf.com
If you’d like to pay into the fund, donate below.
Thank you to our community if donors: Gail Karwoski, Andree Kosak, Carol McKay, Janie Claiborne, Karen Howard
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Thank you to our community if donors: Gail Karwoski, Andree Kosak, Carol McKay, Janie Claiborne, Karen Howard 〰️
The Alice Woodruff Scholarship by Ann Woodruff
My mother is known in the OCAF circle as a Master Potter. Her work has been created, collected, and displayed in Oconee County since 1970.
What you may not know is that, like so many people who don't know how to rest on their laurels, she also went back to school as a single mother in the late '90s.
The story told about her first foray at the University of Georgia is that she was so excited to get into the ceramics department that she broke into the building before the semester started and threw pots over the course of one overnight manic production.
She used the clay allotted for all the students in the entire ceramics course for the entire semester in one 12-hour period.
I remember the gleam in her eye as she recounted filling every surface with freshly thrown pots. Pots stacked on bookcases, pots lined up on tables, pots snuck on top of bookshelves. Every board and bat used and every ounce of clay used before the semester had even started, all by one student who technically wasn't even a student yet...
And thus, after one semester, when she decided that she could already throw better than everyone else, she transferred to Miami University in Ohio.
YOUTH!
In the late '60s, everyone was required to take a foreign language, and she decided that Chinese would be an "easy A." and again, YOUTH!
She was wrong.
After failing Chinese and a handful of other classes, she withdrew and came home to make pots in Oconee County.
When my mother went back to school as a non-traditional student in the late '90s, she really had to start from the beginning. She didn't remember basic algebra and had to pick up the study skills she lacked 25 years later than most.
Those were lean, hard years for our family.
She was a full-time student. She wasn't selling as much work. And she was raising two preteen kids.
After proving herself at Truett McConnell, located in the old Bell's shopping center, by acing pre-algebra, she was able to transfer to the University of Georgia and start applying for and receiving scholarships.
Those scholarships made it possible for her to go to school.
Decades after using all the clay in the art department, she graduated with highest honors from the University of Georgia, then from the Medical College of Georgia's nursing program, and then from Georgia State with a master's degree.
From breaking into the ceramics department and using all he clay, to sitting in pre-algebra as a middle-aged single mother, to graduating with highest honors and eventually earning a master's degree.
Scholarships made all the difference for my mother and for our family. They gave her the opportunity to keep going. So when OCAF offered to name a scholarship fund in her honor, I wholeheartedly agreed.
An Epitaph for Alice, by Gail Karwoski
Most people knew Alice because of her art. Art was her core. Her meaning. Who she was. What she did. Why she lived. How she cried and when she laughed. As the dancer cannot be separated from the dance, Alice cannot be separated from her art.
For decades, Alice’s art was functional in every sense of the word. She created art to earn her living, to feed her family. She made bowls and plates and mugs. Her pottery held a family’s food and drink. Thousands of functional pieces. Alice held earth - clay - in her hands and shaped it into vessels that held the essence of daily life. Thousands and thousands of people are using her pottery. They remember Alice for the sky blue glazes that gave everyday ware the patina of heaven. All those years, Alice, the master craftsman, was the artist who imbued our everyday tables with the colors of heaven.
In the middle of her life, Alice redefined herself as a healer, a nurse, a person called to help others. But art was the center of her being, and she was destined to return to it. When she did, Alice returned with a vengeance. She grabbed slabs of earth and heaved them into vessels to scream at injustice, at pain that drives a boy to renounce his life. To mourn for Sam - her son who committed suicide - and all the people whose suffering is impossible to soothe.
She returned with a vengeance and shaped earth into women, women with stories to tell. Stories so profound, so powerful, that they made us join hands and weep. Warrior Women. This collection - the Warrior Women - stands one hundred plus. The skill, the attention to detail, the sheer craftsmanship, is magnificent. An army of clay, of everywomen, who marched into our consciousness and gave us strength to declare, “Never again”! Women can never be silenced again by rape, by slavery, by brutality. The Warrior Women collection was Alice’s masterpiece, which she created against the odds. As she fought her own battle with breast cancer. As she shook her fists - wet with clay - at the heavens. As she promised that women can rise, can rise from the depths of horror, can shape a fair, just, and beautiful future. Warrior Women was Alice’s promise to her beloved daughter Ann, to her precious granddaughter Luna, and to all of us, every one of us who beheld her work and were inspired - nay, transformed - by it. Her promise that the future can be better than the past, that we can endow the patina of heaven into the vessels of our days.
But Alice the artist wasn’t done. Before she breathed her last, she shaped the earth into whimsical critters who frolicked and danced. To make us giggle, to remind us in the very best way that there is joy and laughter amid terrible suffering.
This is Alice’s legacy. Her art encourages us to see heaven everyday, to know we are strong, to scream when we see injustice, to recognize beauty, and to emulate our heroines. And, finally, to remember to giggle.
