All her life, Tracey Broome has created things. Growing up in Myrtle Beach, she helped her father build and reupholster furniture, then went on to have a decade-long career designing furniture showrooms in High Point and across the country.
When the furniture business moved overseas, Broome, 51, started working in theater set and prop design, first in Charlotte and later for several local theaters, including Manbites Dog in Durham and the ArtsCenter Stage in Carrboro. She's made everything from fake pies and frogs to dolls that had to burn during performances.
"Whatever it is, if someone asks, 'Can you make this?' I say sure, and then I go figure out how to do it," said Broome, who lives in Chatham County, near Carrboro.
So it's not surprising that Broome has acquired another skill - pottery. She'd long admired the craft introduced to her by her grandmother, but she wasn't inspired to try it until she saw a wheel-throwing demonstration at the State Fair 13 years ago.
"I'm going to do that," she told her daughter, Wesley, then 5. Her daughter's response: "You go for it, Mommy."
Broom began to study and work with clay in the late 1990s, but didn't sell anything for nearly a decade.
"I threw away just about everything I made for years. I think it's like that '10,000-Hour Rule' - you've got to put the time in."
After moving from Charlotte to the Triangle in 2005, Broome began to work and teach at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro and at Claymakers in Durham. In 2007, she started participating in small craft fairs, selling small decorative items, ornaments and pendants.
Finding her theme
Last year, Broome's art took a new turn, which has brought her more opportunities and attention.
"I saw a call for artists at the Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh for an exhibit called N.C. Landscape, and that started it all," she said.
Broome was familiar with the show's theme. As a child, her family would often drive the rural roads between Myrtle Beach and High Point, and she'd stay with her grandparents there every summer.
While pondering ideas for the show, the image of barns came to her.
"My grandfather loved to ride around for hours in the country. None of the other grandchildren would put up with it, but I loved looking out the windows at the barns and fences and pastures, and all those colors, especially the really rusty stuff. I guess it imprinted on my brain."
After much trial and error, Broome constructed a barn she deemed worthy of submitting, created by rolling out thick slabs of clay for the walls and roof, beveling the edges, and connecting them with a thin, wet clay called a slip. She gave it a door and a window and several coats of terra sigillata, a finish that reveals the clay's texture, much the way barn wood shows signs of weather and aging.
"I looked at it and I thought, this is it, this is what I want to do. It spoke to me about who I was going to be as an artist."
Not only was she accepted into the Raleigh show, but later Broome won a spot in a craft competition at the Bascom center in Highlands that was juried by Carol Sauvion, producer of the PBS series "Craft in America".
"I was very proud to be in that show," Broome said. "I felt so much validation as an artist."
She also thought, "I need to step it up."
Always evolving
But before Broome could make more barns, she needed a dedicated space. She saved every penny from pottery sales in 2010, and this spring had a small studio built behind the home she shares with her husband, Gerry, a photojournalist. The space is a stop on the Chatham Studio Tour this weekend and next.
One of Broome's early supporters was Sara Latta Gress, owner of the N.C. Craft Gallery in Carrboro.
"I'd carried Tracey's raku for a while, and when I saw the barns I thought they said so much about North Carolina, and were a lot different than anything else I'd seen," Gress said. "One thing I love about her is she's always evolving."
Indeed, Broome's ideas for the barns already are expanding and maturing.
"They're now more like the canvas," she said.
Some newer ones are adorned with patterns and found objects, others are tall and slim, and some display text, including one with song lyrics written by daughter Wesley, now a freshman at the UNC School of the Arts.
"In a way, they tell my story, but they really speak to other people, too. I like to let people come up with their own meanings."
