Sculptor's works reveal influences from around the world

Donna Kincaid has an eclectic sense of style.

While working at her Mountain Vision Pottery studio in Beech Grove last week, she was dressed in blue jean Capris, an old T-shirt, gold-rimmed glasses, a dirty apron, bright red sandals and earrings with a dangling Harley Davidson logo.

She was surrounded by clay sculptures of cats, dogs, an angel, chickens, fish, birdhouses, blue and purple turtles and much more.

“If I don’t have it here in this studio, then I don’t have it,” Kincaid said.

For the past 20 years, Kincaid, 61, has been sculpting pieces of clay into works of art.

Her love affair with pottery began two decades before that, though, Kincaid said. She began collecting pieces of pottery from the destinations she and her husband, Joe, called home while he was in the Navy.

“We’ve literally lived all over the world,” Donna said. “It had quite an influence.”

The couple was living in Japan when she fell in love with pieces of Japanese pottery, she said.

“Before I ever even knew anything about pottery, I kept seeing this beautiful black pottery, so I took a group of Navy wives to Mashiko,” Kincaid said. “I was just blown away because there were these little hut type places where the potters live and they dug their clay back up in the hills and they had these huge mounds of clay that they were reclaiming.”

Her infatuation grew a short time later while the couple was living in Portugal and watching the people there create pottery.

“They were digging the clay there and creating their pieces,” Kincaid said.

Finally, in 1988, while living in Norfolk, Donna attended a clay sculpture class at Old Dominion University with Rita Marlier, a professional sculpting professor.

“I met Rita and the first thing she did was she handed me a lump of clay and she said ‘Now show me what you can do,’ ” Kincaid said. “The moment I touched that clay, I could feel the life in that clay.”

“It was just my way of releasing stress and tension. When I spent four hours every week just focused on that, it just got into my blood.”

Kincaid was a Realtor before deciding to give it up in 2000 to pursue pottery full time. She trained as a production potter for a year before she and Joe moved to Nelson County in 2001.

“It taught me very good discipline,” Kincaid said about the training. “It taught me to really respect production potters, but also, it would really drive me crazy to make the same thing over and over again.”

Almost every piece of pottery Kincaid makes, she alters in one way or another, she said. To vases and bowls, she will add a sculpture of a fish or flowers and hummingbirds.

She also uses leather tool stamps to write small messages or words on some of her pieces.

Kincaid not only has collected pottery from all over the world, but she also has collected clay from places like Wyoming, North Carolina and Maine to make some of her sculptures.

Now, she said, she’s starting to write down ideas she has for sculptures because “I’ve just got a lot in me that needs to come out.”