I became enchanted with clay when I spent summers as a teen at Penland School of Crafts in the mountains of North Carolina. Then, for many years, I had a business called Cerantics and I traveled all around doing shows with my clay jungle gyms and fish bowls. Family life took over and I taught children for years as my children were growing up.
I received a BFA in ceramics at the University of North Carolina and have worked with clay for 30 years. Currently, my figurative sculptures are evocations of a dream world. Inspiration comes from mythology, fairy tales, and dreams, as well as the antics of animals and children. Publications include Ceramics: Art and Perception, Lark Books, The Shambhala Sun, and Better Homes and Gardens. My work is in the National Museum for Women in the Arts and many private collections.
“To see Caroline Douglas’s work is to step into the wake of the sublime. Not the abstract sublime of modernism, but the timeless, exquisitely detailed sublime of childhood: an untrammeled sense of wonder, absorption, and infinite possibility. What does her ceramic menagerie reveal? ‘A bowl of welcome that holds up the sky,” as poet Claudia Van Gerven describes the sculpture “Hand Signals.’
Douglas’s art is best understood without name or label, theory or exegesis. What she offers us is an experience rooted in the physical that also leaps and soars into the mysteries of the heart. To enter her work is to abandon all pomposity, and embrace the absurd, the bold, the unseen, and the magical.” – Elizabeth Marglin, 2008
