The Chapel Hill Herald, November 4, 2000, pg 3

Chatham gallery grows from a scrap of newsprint

by Lois Carol Wheatley

PITTSBORO—A single easel stood in the window of a vacant shop in downtown Pittsboro during the waning months of summer. Taped to the easel was a hand-scrawled message on a torn scrap of newsprint paper. It read: “Looking for artists. Call Jenny.” On the message were three phone numbers.

The response at first was slow and cautious, but ultimately curious. And as word got around in the art community that a new gallery was opening in Pittsboro and that the new gallery’s sworn mission was to display and sell local artwork, the trickle of calls turned into a steady stream.

Gallery 18 opened during the first week of October, with its walls and display counters lined with the works of about 15 Chatham artists. With the exception of the annual Chatham County Arts Council Studio Tour—coming up Dec. 2 and 3—Chatham artists have heretofore had no venue to display or sell their wares. This deficiency has been noted often and complained of strenuously.

“Chatham County is really known as an artists’ haven and people come to Pittsboro expecting that they’re going to see all this fabulous Chatham County art,” Gallery 18 owner Jenny McLaurin said. “And there has been nowhere for them to find it. All these artists have their own studios, and you have to get up with them and set up an appointment. Or they have shows in Raleigh or Chapel Hill or Asheville or wherever, and there wasn’t anything like this.”

And now there is. McLaurin dubbed the place Gallery 18 because it sits at 18 Salisbury Street, about two blocks north of the county courthouse, in an off-the-main-street retail space previously occupied by New Horizons Trading Co.

The gallery idea came about as McLaurin shopped for studio space of her own, a place where she could make and sell her own line of hand-crafted jewelry. But filling an entire store with just her own creations seemed a narrow sort of focus, not to mention an overwhelming amount of jewelry-making. Discussions with various people in town and in surrounding areas also persuaded her to expand her scope.

“I didn’t want the shop to just be my work because that would be too much to try to do,” McLaurin said. “I decided I could still do my studio, but the front of the store would be a real gallery space and feature local talent. You don’t have to live in Chatham County to have your work here, but it helps.”

In addition to taping a message to an easel, McLaurin called people she knew she wanted to represent. Everyone said yes immediately, and then they all told someone else or they told McLaurin about someone else. “It just kind of snowballed that way,” she said.

She opened the gallery, in fact, with everyone’s work in place except her own. At last check, workers still were building several display cases to house her line of jewelry made with fine silver and/or white gold, set with precious and semi-precious stones, which McLaurin describes as “clean” and “heavy.”

“I try not to make insignificant things,” she said.

Using propane and oxygen, she fires up her imagination to make rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, pendants and “the occasional baby spoon.” “I remake jewelry for people all the time,” she said. “I take apart the grandmother’s pendant and turn it into something more contemporary.”

Her fine arts degree from UNC speaks to a background in painting and drawing, along with a specialization in cartography. She double-majored in geography to go with the map-drawing skills and later went to Penland in western North Carolina to apprentice in jewelry-making.

Before she opened the gallery, McLaurin’s studio was in her house. The house was once her great-great-grandfather’s, on NC 902 near Bear Creek. Like most Chatham studios, it sits on a small farm in a vast pastoral region, miles away from the prospective art customer.

“I just sort of felt like there’s way too much talent in Chatham County that only is shown once a year,” McLaurin said, “and so here I am, and it’s going well. My expectations are that this will be the kind of place that people have to think about, because these are all fairly big, significant pieces.”

One significant piece is that scrap of newsprint that McLaurin has stashed away. It doesn’t look like much but, when mounted on an easel in a vacant storefront, it has had a rather profound influence on the course of recent events.

If things continue to snowball as they have been, McLaurin says she just might wind up framing and hanging it along with the other artwork.