UMVA Showcase – Spring 2026: Jemma Gascoine, Jennifer Lee Morrow, Ann Thompson, Betsey Foster

Jemma Gascoine – An Urn in Time

It’s January 2026 and my Dad is on his deathbed in his living room in Surrey, England. He opens his eyes and forms words in a way that only a few of us understand at this point. “You never made my urn!” he utters, disappointed.

It’s true that I have dragged my feet regarding the making of his urn. I thought that we both had more time, him to live and me to clear the decks of my pay-the-bills pottery work. I had shrugged the task off because I thought that there would be a better moment for me to attend to it, somewhere down the line, into the future.

When Dad asked me to make the urn a couple of years ago, I wasn’t sure what shape to begin with. Initially he wasn’t satisfied with the photo of my prototype, a bulbous-bellied pot with a narrow foot and neck. Maybe he wondered how his ashes would fit in it without spilling; maybe he worried it would topple over.

When I think of a funerary urn, I think of the fabulous ancient Greek vase painter and potter Exekias who worked in the black-figure technique circa 540 BC, whose cavorting mythological scenes unfolded spectacularly around his vessels. How would I ever make anything quite that incredible? So this Herculean task descended further and further down the to-do list. I delayed and delayed until last November, when I sensed something was wrong.

“Actually Dad,” I said, “I made three urns in November. I’ll ask Todd to email over photos and you can choose one.” Todd, my American husband, is packing his bags in Maine as he is about to fly in and say “goodbye” to Dad. He finds the photo of the ten-inch-tall red stoneware urns I threw on one of my potter’s wheels. I show Dad; Dad shows his second wife Carmelita, a Filipina, her name now Anglicized to Carmen, which happens to be my dad’s favorite opera. Carmen selects the blue rutile urn. Blue is always a popular color for pottery. When people come to Monson Pottery looking to buy a gift for their menfolk, my twenty-one-year-old assistant Candace always steers them toward the blue pieces first.

When Todd arrives from the US a couple of days later and shows Dad the urn, he nods, laying his head back on the pillow, tired from the exertion. He motions with a wave of his hand which shelf the urn will occupy. I agonize about the fact that I didn’t have time to make a lid. My Dad notices. “How about a cork lid?” I suggest nervously.

Todd takes the dimensions of the neck of the pot. I know, however, that it’s going to be tricky because clay shrinks, and I mixed two different clays with slightly different shrinkage rates to make this urn. It’s also hard to maintain a perfectly circular rim on a large vessel. The opening usually dries somewhat ovoid, meaning the flange of the lid will be hard to fit. I will have to make multiple lids for one to work. I grind my teeth in grim determination.

The day Todd and I take our leave to fly back to our students, assistants, artists-in-residence, businesses, and art workshops in Central Maine, Dad whispers, “You should be happy for me; this is what I want.” I end up defending myself for weeping, mumbling something about it being “reasonable for daughters to cry at moments like this.” Agghh, he’s so German matter-of-fact.

Later, he wonders how I price my pottery and sculpture, which totally takes me aback as he’s not usually interested in the specifics of my work. “It’s experience Dad, I’ve been selling for twenty-five years, you get a sense of it.” I put this unusual curiosity down to the morphine he’s taking.

And that was it. He died in his living room two weeks later with Carmen and my youngest brother Jacob by his side. Now my work spells the shape of what remains of him, his ashes, in a protective sort of way on a living-room shelf in Surrey, England.

 

Jennifer Lee Morrow

My work serves as a type of journal that records my time in the studio: the thoughts, emotions, and objects that are part of my life during the time of making. Our Time includes a range of materials including clock parts, some that I originally created in the late ‘80s and some that entered my life recently.

 

Ann Thompson

So many Eleventh Hours, environmental, political, and existential . . .

 

Betsey Foster

The natural world and our place in it is both my life’s focus and my sense of contentment. Art is my way of sharing what I see in nature, as well as what I feel when out roaming the mountains and waterways of Maine.

I am a latecomer to art. With a Master’s in Public Health, I had a career in environmental science. Upon retirement, I began to study drawing and watercolor with a number of artists/teachers. The way pigments flowed with water and took on their own lives intrigued me. Then I took an encaustic workshop and fell in love with fire and wax and their interaction.

This piece was inspired by a chunk of rock, a large piece of granite pegmatite with schorl inclusions. It was mined at the Emmons Mine in Greenwood, Maine, and I first spotted it outside the door of a geochemist. While he saw crystals and various processes and an interesting specimen, I saw humans marching across the bridge of time. The schorl, commonly called black tourmaline, represents people, and the orange bridge is simply rust stains. I mentally removed all the extraneous minerals and created this with encaustic medium on cradleboard. The process included carving out the “people” shapes, filling the shapes with black encaustic wax, and then scraping back that wax to reveal the people hidden within.