Community Gallery

Current Exhibition

And Then the Superbloom Surprised Everyone: Ceramics by Julia Janeway

Exhibition Dates: September 25–November 13, 2026

Reception: Friday, October 16, 5–8 pm

Rogue Valley artist Julia Janeway’s exhibition features colorful ceramic pieces with bold sgraffito and uplifting designs.

Artist Statement

Like a lot of artists, I consider my work one long story with individual and universal themes, mythical and mundane images, a well-trod narrative that is constantly changing— and often with thrilling surprises.

I started working in clay a long time ago and what drew me was the physicalness of it, the fact that I could literally turn an abstract idea into stone.  At the same time, clay revealed itself to be aggravatingly unpredictable. It didn’t matter that I had honed my skills; even today I’ll sometimes open the kiln and behold the glaze gone crazy, or a piece that has slumped or cracked.

This is what happened to a piece I made for the last show I had at the Rogue Gallery.  Titled “The Story of the Animals and the 2020 Fire As Told by an Authentic Phoenix,” I had carved on this Grecian urn-like form the things I had both witnessed and been told about when the fire raged up the Rogue Valley.  This vessel was to be the center of the show so imagine my dismay when I took it out of the glaze firing and discovered it had split on the base, right where I had carved the city of Talent, on fire.

I put it in the show anyway.  Why?  Because what I was trying to get at in that show is the same idea I am reaching for in this one: that sometimes, even when you are choked with furious ash, helpless in the fragments, so convinced that the end of the story will be tragic… sometimes you will be surprised. A moment of hilarity or courage or connection or beauty will occur.  The spring after the 2020 fire, but still in the midst of social and political upheaval, still in the pandemic, the California poppies started blooming.  It was a superbloom and along the west coast people were so startled that they pulled their cars to the sides of roads and highways, because they had to walk out, to be in the midst those wild flowers.

Alone in my studio, I think a lot about how art is paying attention.  I listen to a lot of podcasts and stories.  I work on my own images, take breaks by scrolling through others’ images.  Even though we live in an often corroding “attention economy,” I believe we nevertheless have agency in what we choose to notice.  In the rising tidal wave of the collective narrative, we are brought together, yes, by sorrow and outrage— but we are also brought together by the courage of others (the Portland Frog), the gestures of healing (the Native American women dancing in their jingle dresses over the places where Rene Good and Alex Pretti were killed), and the sublime (a glimpse of Jimothy in Seattle!)

Says the poet Marge Piercy:

Atention is love and what we give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool.  Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.

Julia Janeway
juliajaneway.com