The last pot has been thrown and the final mug glazed. The Jasper Pottery Club’s last remaining members are spending May packing up the club’s equipment and inventory and moving out from the basement of the Activity Centre, where potters of all ages have had a space to play with clay for many years. By June the pottery room will be empty and the club disbanded.

“It’s sad for the community, it was so much fun,” said Ursula Winkler, a club member since 1989 and one of the small number who stayed active over the years.

While fellow pottery person Ellen Merilovich agreed with Winkler, she added that in practical terms, the club space had become too much to manage.

“It’s mostly a relief now. There hasn’t been the interest lately to run the place. For years it’s been Ursula and I, pretty much.”

That wasn’t always the case. Both women recalled a time when the pottery club had many members and the room would be full of people practicing the craft or taking courses from veteran potters. The legacy of that period is still visible as the two box up the few remaining pieces.

“I made this in 1993,” Winkler marvels, holding an unfinished cup in her hands. Any unclaimed objects will be up for sale at the upcoming Spring Market, including a set of blue wine glasses that look ready for a place setting, once you scrub the clay dust off.

That’s one of the problems with planning any future space for a community pottery centre, Winkler said. The club hasn’t been involved in the discussions around a new performing and visual arts centre because pottery would have to take place in a designated space.

“You can’t share space,” she said. “There’s so much dust, air pollution.”

Still, Merilovich and Winkler didn’t want to see the school children of Jasper miss out on the chance to try their hand on a potting wheel, so they were very happy when Marie-Claude Faucher of Ecole Desroches expressed an interest on dedicating some space for the club’s old equipment.

“It’s a brilliant experience for the kids and we don’t want it lost,” said Merilovich, who added that any plans for the kiln and wheels will have to wait until a new school facility is designed and built.

“It’s all going into storage until a new school is built, so we don’t really know how that’s going to work out yet,” she said.

If and when a new pottery centre is set up in the francophone school, the facility will be accessible to students at all three schools, as some of the equipment has been purchased with grant money and cannot be used by an exclusive group. Any adult pottery enthusiasts would have to go through Adult Learning to arrange community access, Winkler predicted.

The nearest pottery club is located in Hinton, and while Winkler and Merilovich plan to send them some unused clay, they don’t expect to be travelling down Highway 16 to keep up with their craft. Like many former club members, Winkler said she’s done with pottery for now.

“I’ve not been actively doing it for some time,” she said. “The administrative stuff takes over your creative juices. It has been a joy to be down here though.”

Merilovich meanwhile, jokes about getting back into it after her kids grow up, but for now, the pottery club is history.