Lawrence.com

Cathy Tisdale lives about 4 miles of gravel road off of the paved highway northbound out of Lawrence. Her home and her studio overlook lush, rolling valleys that make you wonder if you're still in Kansas. Visitors are greeted by a friendly old dog no more welcoming than Tisdale herself. Her studio is small, just half of a garage building she and her husband built, the other half houses his tools and workshop.

Though her studio is small, it's clearly the location of much creativity and productivity. Raw materials, experiments, photographs, forms from nature, and works in progress fill every inch of the space. And even on a sultry spring day, the rise in temperature that occurs when the door to her kiln room is opened is noticeable.

There is continuity between shapes of her ceramic sculptures, and the shapes of the natural forms she's collected. From the ceiling there are dried lotus leaves hanging and at various points in the room, clay representations of those shapes. Several large pieces on her worktable suggest the natural forms one associates with the sea.

Tisdale's sea forms began as interpretations of the life forms she saw in pictures and in visits to tide pools and other shoreline habitats. Four years ago she decided it was time to take a serious look beneath the surface and took up scuba diving. She trained locally and got her certification in Belize. Tisdale has recently been on a diving trip Thailand.

Originally from St. Louis, Tisdale studied sociology at KU before moving west and taking up ceramics out in Lake Tahoe.

Since returning in '79 to make her home once again in Lawrence, Tisdale has studied and pursued her art full time. Recently, in addition to rendering her sea forms in clay, she's been inspired by other water flora closer to home. The lotus leaves she's been sculpting come from the pond on her own property.

Tisdale has been experimenting and expanding her technical repertoire, developing a method for adding paper pulp to clay, which allows her to roll the clay in an extremely thin layer. She is able to use these thin sheets of paper-reinforced clay to create very delicate, coral-like structures. The paper is burned away during the firing of the pieces, leaving a somewhat porous clay structure behind. Many of these pieces are displayed on top of small, incandescent lamps to take advantage of these properties.

Tisdale's work can be seen at the Phoenix Gallery at 919 Massachusetts in Downtown Lawrence.