10/01/2005

By MARSHALL HOOD  / Associated Press

The Logan Clay Products Co. turns out a mile of sewer pipe every day, but it's not all destined to carry, well, you-know-what.

Some of it is crafted into objects of beauty.

"When I tell people the artwork they're buying is sewer pipe, they love it," sculptor Mary Collier of Virginia Beach, Va., said as she coerced a glob of orangy clay into an impressionistic human hand.

Behind her on the production floor of the weathered 1890s factory, a half-dozen sweating workers pulled lengths of damp terra-cotta pipe from a monstrous extruder.

For the past 25 years, Logan Clay has hosted three-times-a-year workshops for professional clay artists nationwide — a venture that in the spring earned it a Governors Award for its support of the arts.

The "pipers," as they are known, spend from four to 10 days in April, June and September transforming the malleable pipes into objets d'art. Once fired in the plant's giant, Dante-esque kilns, they become sculptures in museums, galleries, parks, homes and gardens.

"It's one way we give back," said Dick Holl, president of the sprawling 25-acre operation in the center of this Hocking County city of 6,700.

Logan Clay's 100 employees create about 200 sizes, shapes and varieties of sewer pipe, chimney flues and other ceramic building conduit — 60,000 tons of products a year that start off as clay and shale unearthed from within 30 miles of the plant.

For the artists, working with an endless supply of material and in a facility that can accommodate large-scale works is a pipe dream come true.

"At my studio, I have to do things in sections," said Susan Bastinelli, a Norfolk, Va., sculptor who sells through three East Coast galleries. "Here, I can do very big pieces."

Before her on a battered wooden worktable sat a collection of baseball bats. Inserting one into a 4-foot stand of pipe, she whacked the sides back and forth to shape the clay tube into a vase.

"I started working in clay when I used to work in a psychiatric hospital," Bastinelli said with laugh as she beat the pipe into artistic submission. "I discovered that it was good for me when I got home."

The Logan project has allowed Clare Balombin of Columbus' North Side to broaden her artistic reach from sculpting human faces. She learned about the workshop from an instructor at the Columbus Cultural Arts Center and decided to undertake several large outdoor pieces.

"This is the first time I've worked with clay this size," Balombin said, as she draped wet sheets around the pipes to keep them soft enough to manipulate.

Balombin's deal with her husband is that whatever she makes will go in their garden, not in their Clintonville home.

Nearby, Sally McInerney of Corbin City, N.J., was giving birth to a family of penguins.

Inspired by the movie "The March of the Penguins," she kneaded and trimmed her pipes to reveal 3-foot beaked birds while alternately working on a life-size inverted acrobat.

McInerney has attended one or two workshops a year since they started.

"This is such an interesting collaboration with art and industry," she said. "The Holls have been marvelous patrons of the art."

Logan Clay's employees have developed artistic eyes, as well, although plant supervisor Roger Hoslar acknowledged with a smile, "We still look at some of it and go, 'Is that art?'"

But the artists and workers have developed a bond.

"Our guys kind of like it (having artists in the plant) and like to work and socialize with them," Holl said.

Many have purchased finished works and are quick to help the artists struggling on the plant floor.

"We give them as much clay as they want, and we'll stop what we're doing to give them a hand," Hoslar said. "These pipes can be pretty heavy."

One worker even helped create a showpiece — inadvertently.

After a sculpture toppled a few years ago, a forklift operator nicknamed "Tater" accidentally drove over it, leaving deep tire impressions.

"The artist liked it so well, he put it in an exhibit," Hoslar recalled.

"He titled it Tater Tracks."