Virginia Felix: Enlivened by Words and Nature’s Art Susan McHenry

Appears in the December 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

Brooklyn artist Virginia Felix was planning a trip to the Grand Canyon, Northern Arizona’s Antelope Canyon, and Arches National Park in Moab, Utah. These are places she calls “nature’s art,” but when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, she had to resort to researching those geological wonders online rather than in person. She was eager to begin working on an idea that had been brewing for awhile—making sculptures that would draw on the parallels between the earth’s canyons and the human form, specifically the female form. These canyons, carved out over millennia by erosion, would become the inspiration for her Figura Project series, starting Felix on a journey toward discovering her own voice in clay.

Life in Brooklyn

Felix grew up in Brooklyn, New York, recalling her childhood there as full of life. “There was always something to do,” she says—summer block parties, hanging out on stoops, spending time at parks and beaches, playing tag, and running through open fire hydrants with her friends. But it wasn’t always idyllic. She also witnessed a great deal of crime, and developed a sixth sense in knowing which neighborhoods to avoid. Today’s Brooklyn is very different from the Brooklyn of her childhood, she says. “It’s much quieter, artsy, and cooler.” Felix graduated in 2014 with a degree in business management from Berkeley College in Manhattan, and she now works full time with a financial investment firm in New York City’s financial district. She says in many ways, she still feels like a beginner with clay.

Felix took her first ceramics class in 2017 at Bklyn Clay, a community studio offering classes, individual memberships, and kiln rentals, after gifting her partner a private lesson for the two of them. At the time, she had been working on a personal essay and was struggling with writer’s block. Working with clay didn’t come easily to Felix, but she noticed that the physicality of it allowed her mind to feel free. Though she tends to steer clear of things she’s not good at, this feeling of freeness is what kept her coming back to take more classes.

When classes at Bklyn Clay were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Felix set up a makeshift studio in the spare bedroom of her Brooklyn apartment. She has everything she needs there to coil build sculptures and make wheel-thrown dinnerware. She works with the studio’s white stoneware clay and has been allowed to take home 25 pounds per week during the pandemic. Because she can’t have a kiln in her apartment, she takes her greenware back to Bklyn Clay to be fired. Felix says she could do without the bumpy 40-minute car ride to the studio, however, as she’s lost several bone-dry pieces in transit.

The work is bisque fired to cone 06 so it remains somewhat porous. All of her sculptural work is left unglazed, allowing the scratch marks from a Surform tool to reference the textured appearance of weathered rock. 

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, Felix has been working from home and is able to dedicate more time to clay. And because she’s also had more time to post on social media, she’s seen an increase in sales, including an opportunity to sell some sculptural pieces and tableware items with West Elm, a retailer offering modern furniture and home décor. Pieces are made to order and she drop ships them to customers. Before the pandemic, Felix would commute to Bklyn Clay after work for a few hours, often getting home late. Now, when done with work for the day, or even just on a break, she can get started on her clay orders or take time to experiment with new ideas. She enjoys working from home in this way and hopes she can maintain this balance once she needs to return to the office.

The Allure of Negative Space

Central to Felix’s work is the notion of space—within, between, and around her forms. She enjoys the challenge of creating negative spaces in her sculptures, and finds a certain power in this kind of absence. She refers to it as carving out an inner space. Building forms where the negative space is an active part of the piece is like creating two or three sculptures in one, she says. For instance, pieces in her Vita lamp series, inspired by Utah’s Delicate Arch, begin as two separate coil-built structures that connect at the top.

Felix first became inspired by nature’s arches and canyons when she saw images of light pouring in through a cave’s opening or wrapping around a natural arch’s curves. She thought, “How can I bring this into my home and other people’s homes?” At the time, she was also thinking about the connection between earth’s caves and canyons and the human female form. Studying the work of Modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth, whose work draws references to biomorphism (biomorphic is derived from the Greek words bios, meaning life, and morphe, meaning form), Felix grew more interested in bringing this quality into her own work.

The first piece in Felix’s Figura series was her Eden sculpture, which references the Birthing Cave in Sedona, Arizona, where it is theorized that women from the Hopi Tribe would hike to give birth. Felix started the sculpture before she even knew the story behind the Birthing Cave. Once she learned of the cave’s history, she realized she was tapping into a universal language around particular shapes.

Much of Felix’s time is spent refining the negative space on these forms, shaving down the internal arches to get them just right. Silhouettes and shadows created by the play of light through the negative space intrigue her. Wanting these pieces to serve as functional works, it felt natural to turn the Vita sculptures into lamps, to become a source of light. With these sculptures, Felix says she’s attempting to bring a piece of Earth’s own art into other people’s lives.

Inspired by Words

Interested in writing since she was a child, Felix has kept several journals—a dream journal, plant journal, and a hobby journal. “I tend to live in my thoughts,” she says. She keeps a morning ritual where she jots down these thoughts before getting out of bed. She says she often writes three pages each day. It’s a great way to begin the day, giving voice to her reflections so she can feel unburdened.

It felt only natural to bring her writing life into her studio practice. As a writer, she’s never without pen and paper. Things come up often as she’s sculpting, and so she keeps a pen and paper handy in the studio, too. While working on a piece, she writes down feelings, insights, or frustrations, referring to these as field notes. Sometimes even just a phrase or word from her notes will lead to ideas for new sculptures.

Certain sculptures have taken on their own voices at times, too. Felix says her Nova sculpture had a mind of its own. In her field notes, she wrote, “Today is a lesson in not having any control. On letting the unpredictability of clay have its own shape and angle. Watching the vessel form its own lines, shadows, and curvature. And using my hand as merely its tool. Its goal: overtaking space.” Felix had intended for the piece to be small in scale, but she says this piece seemed to want to get bigger. She was initially focused on the cost and firing limits, since she pays for firings by the cubic inch, and also felt concerned about how she would replicate the piece should she decide to sell it. But, ultimately, she gave the piece permission to speak through her. It ended up being 25 inches wide. “I am disposable today. The clay is alive.” She went on to write, “This piece is a soul, as it does not see or think, does not move or feel, does not talk or laugh. I am this vessel’s human body, its tool.”

Many artists believe their work should speak for itself, that words aren’t necessary to convey intention or ideas. But Felix believes words add a layer of depth to her work, helping to bring it to life. On her website, she pairs images of her sculptures alongside her field notes, so the viewer can glimpse her thoughts. “Each sculpture holds a story. I document each experience and my emotional response during the creation of each piece,” she says. “The sculptures are more than clay. They are the human hand and human thought.”

Embracing Vulnerability

W.E.B. Du Bois coined the word “two-ness” to describe an inward state that people of color experience because of racialized oppression and devaluation in a white-dominated society. He wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”¹ The word two-ness (also written as twoness) became the guiding force behind Felix’s Vita sculpture, prompting her to create the piece in two separate parts before joining them together. As a person of color and an American, Felix says she actively experiences two-ness in her everyday life. Whether professionally, personally, or in what she chooses to share on social media, Felix says she feels the need to adjust accordingly to her different identities and what she feels is expected of her. This leads her to often feel challenged with knowing how to express herself. She says she’s starting to learn to create for herself, rather than for an audience. Though she hopes to bring awareness to this notion of two-ness, she fears it could be a label that’s too defining. “I want to show up as one whole person,” she says. Showing up in this way requires vulnerability.

There’s a vulnerable aspect to working with clay, too, Felix says. And being vulnerable has changed how she shows up on a daily basis in the studio. Being in finance, she’s a natural planner, comfortable taking only calculated risks. Though an asset in her professional life, this attribute was hindering her creatively. Fear of wasting time and fear of what others might think held her back with both her ceramic work and her writing. She reflects on a piece she had spent days working on, not liking how it turned out. She initially struggled with feeling as though she had wasted her time, but then came to see that she still learned something from working on it, even if she decided not to keep it.

Over the years, Felix has realized that “not being vulnerable limits me from producing genuine work.” She’s learning to let go, to not dictate or judge. And she’s getting better at being willing to risk failure. Now she’ll take a photo of a piece before reclaiming it to remind her of what she’s learned. She says she’s grateful that clay is opening her up to another part of herself that’s always been there, but hasn’t had the chance to come to the forefront.

To see more of Virginia Felix’s work, visit keraclay.com or follow her on Instagram @keraclay.

the author Susan McHenry, is a studio potter, writer, and educator based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. To learn more, visit emptyvesselpottery.com or follow on Instagram @emptyvesselpottery.

[1]The term two-ness originated in an article of Du Bois’ titled “Strivings of the Negro People,” published in the August 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It was later republished and slightly edited under the title “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in his book, The Souls of Black Folk.