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Our World: Filling bowls
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A potter’s solution to hunger: Six artists spend their Saturday producing pottery in an area-wide effort to combat hunger.
DAVID ALBERS / Daily News
Our World: Filling Bowls
For the $10 price of admission, attendees of the event called “Empty Bowls” select a hand-made ceramic bowl and fill it with soup donated by some favorite area eateries. Back at home, the souvenir bowl is a reminder of the hunger in our world. The bowl is to be placed at an empty seat at the dining table.
Donna Torrance, a Barron Collier High School ceramics teacher with roots in popcorn farming in Nebraska, spearheaded the area’s first-ever Empty Bowl’s event in January. It was a response, she says, to the extravagant display of wealth at the annual Naples Winter Wine festival.
With donated clay, glaze and an army of local student and professional potters, these benevolent artists raised $16,000 last year for the Harry Chapin Food Bank to feed the hungry of Southwest Florida.
“It’s all about education and reminding people of hunger,” Torrance says. “It is deceiving when you live in a community like Naples that there is such a need.”
Work began on this year’s pots immediately after the first “Empty Bowls” event sold out. Torrance and her students have spent this year making pots (called “throwing”) after school and weekends. Other local student and professional artist groups also participate.
On a Saturday in November at Barron Collier’s ceramics studio, Torrance holds a special throwing sessions with five other potters working towards the school’s goal of 500 pots before the end of December. In the corner of that studio works BCHS senior Gabby Batson. With methodical concentration, she finishes her 72nd bowl of the year, balancing the inverted cone of earthenware clay on her throwing wheel. She pauses to fix herself some coffee.
“I am shaking from the work and the coffee,” she says to her teammates with a giggle.
Batson, a co-president in the school’s extra-curricular Barron Collier Potter’s Guild, has far surpassed any other potter in the local Empty Bowls effort.
“I saw how much we had last year and I am hoping we have many more bowls this year,” Batson says. “I know that every bowl we make is $10 and the charity can buy a lot more food with it than you or I could.”
The second annual Naples area “Empty Bowls” will be Jan. 26, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. near the band shell at Cambier Park. The potters involved are planning to greatly surpass last’s year’s number of 508 bowls filled.
“The Empty Bowls allows everyone to be a philanthropist,” Torrance says.
E-mail David Albers at dnalbers@naplesnews.com
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