STORY AND PHOTOS BY ERIC ARCHER

Featured in Vol 9, Issue 1: Community

It’s three-thirty in the afternoon when I walk through the front door of Companion Gallery and East Mitchell Clay. As I enter, I step into a gallery space. The lights are off, but that serves as little distraction from the room’s stark white walls adorned with small shelves that hold a kaleidoscope of ceramics. Every wall is covered. Display tables sit in the middle of the room, also adorned with collections of intricate clay pieces.

Light shines from an entryway across the room, leading into an adjoining space. I step in that direction, and as I round the corner, the difference between the calm gallery and this new room is striking. There are tables and surfaces and shelves everywhere. On those surfaces sit tools, and materials, and rags, and clay pieces in various stages of completion. This space is absolutely packed with tools for creation, and one thing made abundantly clear by these two rooms —this is a place for artists.

Across the room are two rows of potter's wheels. Judging from the sound of the room, somewhere above those wheels sits a speaker that fills the background of the space with 80’s pop music. In front of me and to my left is an alcove of workspaces occupied by three artists, all focused intently on their work. Another man stands in front of me and to the left, also intently focused on his work. He looks up at me as I enter.

Eric Botbyl wears a beanie and a black hoodie. The design on the front of the hoodie reads “Companion Gallery”. Contrasting the hoodie is Eric’s large white beard. He has a happy look in his eyes, and underneath the beard is a gentle smile, which gives him an overall look of reserved kindness.

As I step his way, we greet each other, reaching out our hands to shake. After introducing ourselves, Eric gestures to the three men to our left, telling me these are Companion Gallery’s resident artists. He points in their direction and introduces each of them by name, Andrew, Juan, and Horacio. We exchange waves and “nice to meet you's."

Eric asks me if I want to sit outside for our interview. It was rainy this morning, and even now it's a bit overcast, but still it's probably warmer than it has been all week — a nice day to sit outside. He reaches down into a bin and hands me a towel. Dark spots on the cloth give me the inclination that its general use probably involves dealing with and cleaning up clay.

"In case the seats are wet," Eric says.

He leads me in the direction of a door on the other side of the room, past the potter's wheels and out into the damp air. We walk around to the side of the building. There's a patio space here with a few picnic tables. As we wipe off the seats and sit down at the table, I notice towards the back of the patio is a pavilion, and underneath it, a big concrete structure which Eric would explain to me is a large stone kiln.

Eric pulls a cigarette out of his pocket and puts it in his mouth. He lights it as he leans back in his chair. This space, Companion Gallery — it’s clear that this is Eric’s place in the world.

Eric’s story starts in New Jersey — on the Jersey side of Philadelphia. In the fall of 1996, Eric would leave his home in Jersey to attend college here in Jackson, a place very different from the home he was leaving behind.

"Coming from a very urban area to a more like, rural town— man. I know some people called Jackson a city. I mean, Jackson's like a town to me." A town where he would spend his next four years of college before deciding to make the area his home.

"I came to Tennessee to go to Union, with the intention of studying psychology," Eric tells me. "So I drove 1,000 miles, and I went to the registrar and said, ‘I want to be a shrink. Sign me up.’ and they said all the intro to psych. classes are full, take an elective," he smiles.

Given the circumstances, Eric searched through his options and settled on an elective: Ceramics 101.

“I didn't know that I was gonna love it, but I loved it and I lived in the art department,” Eric says. “So I just, that's all I wanted to do was be in there. Weekends, I was in there. You know, if I didn't have class or work, I was in the studio.” It was something about being around ceramics that inspired him— being in the same space as the type of people who spent their time in the ceramics lab.

“Like the painting lab was very quiet — a lot of classical music. The photography lab was silent. The graphics lab, I had absolutely no interest in it, and then you'd go over to ceramics and like somebody was outside burning something, the music was cranked up, somebody was always making another pot of coffee.”

An energy inhabited the ceramics lab day in and day out — an energy that Eric loved, but that wasn’t all of it. There was something about the clay.

“You know, it's heavy. It's wet. It's dusty. It's dirty. You’re lifting and grunting and cutting— wedging. I love the physicality of it,” he says, “There's also kind of an elegance to it once you get on the wheel.”

An unfathomable amount of effort must go into mastering an art like this, but as Eric puts it, “There was a lot to love.”

Oftentimes being an artist is a less than easy way to make a living, and oftentimes it can be downright hard. Upon exiting college, Eric was not going to be an exception to this rule.

“Back then I couldn't even fathom something like this,” he gestures around at the patio, and towards the gallery beside us. “So when I graduated, my wife Jill and I got married, and I needed a job. So I went and hired on over at Morris Nursery.” He tells me how his first month working there he spent landscaping — digging holes, mulching, planting shrubs — whatever they asked him to do.

“But it took about that long for me to really start missing pots.” He smiles. “So I went and spoke with the owners, Dan and Debbie Morris, and I asked them if they would be at all interested in starting a pottery studio there at the nursery, and Mrs. Debbie said—,” Eric looks up at the sky. I can see his happiness reminiscing on this moment. “She said, ‘Well, it's about time.’ She said, ‘We've always wanted to do something like this, and when you handed in your resume it was ceramics this and pottery that,’ and she said, ‘honestly, we've just been giving you stuff to do until you came around and said something’.”

So often it’s these breaks, these moments of kindness that seem to carry people the farthest. In many ways, the studio that Eric started in an old potting shed behind the nursery was the earliest glimmer of what he would one day turn into Companion Gallery.

Eric tells me he would spend six to seven years making pottery behind the nursery before being offered a new location in an old barn amongst the newly planted vineyard at Crown Winery. One of the owners, former Miss Tennessee Rita Howard, had paid a visit to his shop at the nursery, and was impressed with what Eric had to offer.

“She looked around and she said, ‘You know, Peter and I have just planted a vineyard in Humboldt, and we have this barn up, like in the middle of the vineyard that we don't know what to do with.’ She said, ‘You should come look at it’.” So he did— he took a look, and even though the space would require a hefty amount of renovation, he decided to move his shop to the vineyard. “as part of that, we decided to create like, a little like, show space up front— which I'd never had before. And I was selling most of my work, like I would travel to go do craft fairs.”

This was new to Eric. A way to showcase his work right there at his studio. Companion Gallery had truly begun to come together.

Companion Gallery and East Mitchell Clay now has its own space at 2600 E. Mitchell Street in Humboldt, but as Eric points out to me, the property still backs right up to the vineyard. It’s a great place to be— a place that seems to make Eric happy, but no journey is ever a simple one, and getting from Union’s ceramics lab to here was less than easy.

“It's just, it's a weird way to make a living, and so it's taken a lot of hours. Like my friends used to always say, ‘you know, your boss is a jerk’,” he laughs. “You know, because of working long hours. And that's me, you know, but just knowing that like, this is how much it takes to do this. So there was a long period of time where I had to kind of carry that burden myself.”

It makes you wonder if Eric ever stopped to question if all the long hours and hard work were going to be worth it.

“I don't know if my question was, ‘Is it worth it?’. For me, it's always worth it. Just because it's— it's in me to do this, but I think figuring out ways to make it financially viable. It's a big question for definitely the first ten years.” It was a struggle to figure out how to make it all work and support his family at the same time, but Eric kept pushing— this is where he was meant to be.

After years of work, this is a way Eric has found to use Companion Gallery to give back. One thing Eric insists on during our interview is that I talk to the resident artists. To him they’re one of the most important parts of what he’s doing at Companion Gallery.

Andrew Clark sits at one of the potter's wheels inside the studio. He leans forward in his chair using his body weight and his fingers to form together and shape brown clay into a curved vase.

“It's kind of hard when you finish college with a degree in ceramics, or any art— maybe anything, even English or lots of things. It's like, ‘Well, what do I do now?’” Andrew rests his hands gently on the clay and looks up at me. “It's kind of — the residency program here is kind of a trade-off. Trying to trade off hours for a studio space for younger, kind of emerging artists is the idea I think that Eric has. So in exchange for a place to fire kilns and a place to work, all that we put in is ten to twenty hours a week of work in exchange for those things.”

All of the resident artists have their work areas covered with clay and pottery and tools for creation. The shelves above their workstations are teeming with beautiful, intricate pieces of ceramics in various stages of completion. It's work that exudes the amount of skill and practice involved with crafting at this high a level. Despite their clear expertise, each of them tell me how much it has meant to be able to work at Companion Gallery and to work with an experienced artist like Eric.

Horacio Casillas shows me the pieces on his workbench. They’re intricate vases and goblets, with curves and sharp lines. They’re like cathedrals condensed down into small ceramics. He holds a chalice in his hand as he talks to me.

“I think that with our trade, there's a lot of things involved. So having a wheel, having kilns, having just the studio space, materials — it's hard to come by. And so Eric, having already established a place like this makes it easy to continue what we're doing, especially if we don't have, like, the capital to buy our own wheel.” He sets the chalice down on the work table.

“I've done residencies in the past — and they're all over the U.S. Like, there's different types, and things like that, but yeah, I feel like this community is a little bit tighter,” Horacio says, “It's like, we're a somewhat small operation, and each one of us feels like a big part of it."

Juan Barroso echoes these thoughts as we sit across from each other, looking up at the work he has neatly displayed on the shelves above his desk.

"Eric provides some of the materials, the glazes, the firings. I don't have my own kilns yet. So I wouldn't be able to finish the work without this residency." Juan adjusts the chair he’s sitting on. "And there's also some like, critiques— unofficial critiques, and so I need to talk to these guys," he gestures to the other residents, "So there's, there's growth there, just from being able to talk to other people about the work— suggestions." Juan smiles.

"Also working on, on people. If I was back in my home just in my garage, I wouldn't be able to practice like networking and trying to talk to people."

So the residents help Eric teach classes and keep up the gallery and the studio in exchange for the tools they need, but perhaps more importantly, between the four of them, they get to be part of a community — a community that is seemingly ever-expanding.

"We are very much focused on emerging artists. Young people in their late 20s and 30s who are coming up. There's always someone new to discover. There's always exciting new work being produced. I'm always on the lookout for you know — across the field of ceramics — for who is doing something exciting — original work that I'd like to show in this area and beyond."

Eric tells me this, leaning forward in his seat on the patio.

"It's an exciting prospect. I mean, art is good for everyone. Whether it's a career or not, it's tapping into a certain part of ourselves. So I think it's really important to not lose touch with." He nods his head. "And as far as the studio goes, I mean, every person who walks in here, they're here for different reasons. You know, and everybody seems to — they start as students, and then they become friends. You know, when you get to— you get to know people like that."

He nods his head again.

"Then the students become friends with each other, and that spills outside of this studio."

I pack up my things as I’m getting ready to leave the gallery. In the background, I notice the sound of the radio still filling the space. "Material Girl" by Madonna spills out through the radio’s speakers. It’s irony, I think— it makes me smile at least— and perhaps a writer’s mind seeks to find meaning in anything it can, but still.

I am near confident that when Madonna refers to a material world, the material she’s referring to is not clay — but clay is the material Eric Botbyl has built an entire community on, and there seems to be no shortage of people wanting to experience all that Companion Gallery has to offer. The exciting prospect? The more people experience it, the more a passion for art spreads into the world around them.

Eric Archer is a Jackson native and a Journalism student, currently attempting an undergraduate degree at Union University. He enjoys media writing and anything that falls in the realm of music, film and tv, or art. When he's not writing, he is spending time with his son, playing outside or watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for the millionth time.

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