'These really are ugly," I say out loud, wandering among shelves filled with stout little crockery jugs sprouting hideous facial features, each one more grotesque than the next.
The local woman next to me stiffens at my comment, but there's no question that the creators of this unusual art are into scary one-upmanship. That's the point of my pilgrimage to Seagrove, N.C., the back-woods home of generations of humble crafts folk who have long used the local clay to fashion rustic, utilitarian stoneware, from whisky jugs to butter churns, bowls and other assorted household crockery perfect for Halloween parties.
"The likeness was done to scare kids away from poisons and old-timey white lightning," says potter Annie King, whose husband, Terry, has become famous for his contemporary face jugs. "Now, it's a form of Southern folk art."
This Seagrove gallery is brimming with examples. There are small jugs you can hold in the palm of your hand, tall cylindrical jugs appropriate for toting, and massive jugs for standing in the storeroom. These handmade, everyday vessels have little in common, except for their unique, three-dimensional decoration: hooked noses, bulging eyes and gaping mouths filled with jagged teeth that give these face jugs their frightening presence and strange, collectible appeal.
I had seen an early example of this southern American art form on an episode of TV's Antique Road Show. It was large -- probably around 60 centimetres tall -- and sported the typical dark brown "tobacco spit" glaze still used in these parts. It was ugly, too, with that kind of truly tacky, 1960s rumpus-room look that you're likely to uncover at flea markets and suburban garage sales.
It had been picked up for a song at just that kind of sale. Imagine the owner's surprise when the antique expert dubbed his find valuable "American folk art," dated it back to the mid-1800s and slapped a price of $50,000 (all amounts in U.S. dollars) on it.
I was sufficiently intrigued to head down the road from Raleigh to explore the source of this off-beat tradition. The face jug is a rare curiosity. Still, there's no question that a 60-centimetre-tall ugly jug is not the kind of thing you would really want hanging around your house.
"They're hideous," I remark again, then backtrack quickly when I catch my southern guide's steely eye. "In a cool sort of way, I mean."
The provenance of these pieces is definitely cool. And it really is cool to find a modern generation of potters making cups, bowls and jugs the same way their distant forefathers did, and firing them with old-fashioned salt glazes in big wood-fired groundhog kilns.
Like the basic brown jugs you find in local antique stores, some dating back 200 years, these families of potters have been "turning" out here in the back woods of North Carolina for generations.
They came because of the local clay, and stayed until "modern" materials, such as glass and plastic, ended a century of demand for their functional pottery containers and household goods. A few persevered, though, creating art pottery after the First World War, and ensuring that, even today, the Seagrove name is synonymous with stoneware. The area remains one of the largest and oldest communities of working potters in the United States.
Not only are the local face jugs collectible, but collectors from across the country also come to Seagrove for the spring "kiln openings," when potters reveal their latest creations. And they gather at big antique sales, like the massive outdoor Liberty Antiques Festival, to pick up pieces of old Jugtown Pottery signed by early artisans such as Edward Webster and Gurdon Robins, or later masters such as Dorothy Auman and Ben Owen. Face jugs made by one of the first black potters, known only as "Dave the Slave," fetch the highest prices, but some of the most dramatic are the fire-engine-red "devil" jugs, complete with horns, made by Burlon Craig, a beloved septuagenarian potter who died last year.
