Lisa Oakley blows into the mouthpiece of a hose attached to a metal rod, one end glowing with an electric-orange orb of molten glass. She rolls the rod back and forth on her workbench, coaxing the expanding form with a variety of tools. She’s been glassblowing for 30 years, so it takes her only half an hour to turn the glob into an exquisite blue bowl.

When she’s done, she steps out of the heat of her studio and into the shade of the pine trees that she and her father planted some 50 years ago. The squat wood buildings around her appear to have sprouted from the earth along with the flowers. Clay and glass sculptures peek from the surrounding gardens to wink in the dappled sunlight.

When husband-and-wife potters Sid and Pat Oakley bought their Creedmoor property in 1968, it was just an old tobacco field. Photography courtesy of Cedar Creek Gallery

When Lisa’s parents, Sid and Pat, purchased this land in southwest Creedmoor in 1968, it was a barren former tobacco field. The young potters were looking for a place away from their home in Butner for a simple studio and kiln shelter. But as Sid was prone to do, he began to dream. And over the next 36 years, the master potter shaped this place — which he and Pat named Cedar Creek Gallery — like he shaped lumps of wet clay. He pressed paths into the earth, glazed the landscape in green, and crafted an idyllic community of artists.

“Sometimes I wonder how he had the vision he had,” Lisa says. She wipes the sweat from her forehead. “I mean, this is Granville County. His mother was a sharecropper, and his father died when he was 10, so it was not your normal setup to become a hippie potter. But he was always a dreamer. He had ideas and visions.”

Now under Lisa’s guidance, Cedar Creek feeds artisans — literally and metaphorically — and keeps craft alive in an age of mass production. Of all the beautiful things Sid left behind when he died in 2004, this place is his greatest masterpiece.

• • •

As a young man, Sid worked as a recreational therapist at an alcohol rehabilitation center. “He was not OK with the patients gluing tiles onto a premade ashtray or taking a precut piece of leather and just looping it together to make a wallet,” Lisa says. “He wanted them to have something more meaningful that brought out their confidence.”

He applied for and received a grant from the state to train with potters in Seagrove. Then he brought back what he’d learned to his patients.

Sid Oakley Photography courtesy of Cedar Creek Gallery, photographed by Alex Boerner

That’s the kind of person her dad was, Lisa says. Sculptor Michael Sherrill, a longtime friend of Sid’s from Bat Cave, told Lisa that Sid used to buy his pots in the winter because artists struggle to make sales in those months.

“My dad didn’t really have the money to do that, but he did it because he knew it was important, and then he’d figure out how to pay for it,” Lisa says. “That’s sort of the philosophy that has sprouted among this place.”

Sid’s generosity grew Cedar Creek. At first, there was just one studio: his and Pat’s. Sid was known for his wheel-thrown vessels coated in a crystalline glaze, Pat for her hand-coiled pots. But Sid had a tendency to build studios for other artists who showed up.

Pat Oakley Photography courtesy of Cedar Creek Gallery, photographed by Alex Boerner

Potter Brad Tucker came to Cedar Creek in 1981 for what was supposed to be a two-week apprenticeship. He never left, and he works on-site to this day, in the studio that Sid built for him. John Martin, a potter and the head groundskeeper, has a similar story. There are now 11 working ceramic and glass artists at Cedar Creek, as well as countless others who come for short visits to learn, collaborate, and commune.

“When artists work in isolation, we [only] have what we’ve got,” Lisa says. “But together, we ping-pong off each other and make each other better.”

The two-room building that started as Sid and Pat’s studio eventually became a gallery showcasing the works of Cedar Creek artists and others. Over the years, the Oakleys kept adding on to the space, and today, the sprawling 4,000-square-foot gallery curates and sells the works of more than 250 local, regional, and national artisans.

Lisa and Pat Oakley photograph by Alex Boerner

Pat, now 83, says she never could’ve imagined what Cedar Creek would become. But she believes Sid knew — or, at least, he dreamed.

“It’s miraculous,” she says. “I have to give a lot of credit to the people who came out here to buy from us and help Cedar Creek grow. Without that, we would’ve been nothing. Every person who’s come here has had some influence. It’s the weaving together of many different things that makes a blanket or a community.”

• • •

For the Oakleys, Cedar Creek is more than a business — it’s home. Two years after buying the property, Sid and Pat built their house on it. Lisa and her older brother, David, grew up playing baseball among the kiln shelters and studios, using peach trees as bases. Lisa adored being her dad’s assistant in the summers or when he’d return to his studio after dinner. The chemical storage room is still stacked high with glaze jars and buckets labeled in her bubbly teenage script.

The summer Lisa was 16, Sid taught her how to make pots. “You’re really good,” he told her. “You need to practice eight hours a day, and you need to work in the gallery eight hours a day.”

“But I was a teenager, so I needed to sleep 12 hours a day.” Lisa laughs. “So that didn’t add up. But we were always encouraged to explore. Anything artistic that David or I wanted to participate in, there was ample encouragement for.”

She was 30 before she found the craft that brought her the kind of joy that clay brought Sid and Pat. In 1994, she saw an ad for a two-week glassblowing experience at Penland School of Craft in Bakersville. She signed up with her parents’ blessing.

“I called home from Penland the very first night and said, ‘This is what I want to do.’” Sid immediately began building her a studio.

• • •

“What is it you want us to do with this place?” Lisa asked her dad one day in 2003, after he’d become sick with emphysema. At the time, she was working as a glassblower in the studio he’d built her and running the gallery alongside Pat. But Cedar Creek was still very much Sid’s.

“He said, ‘It’ll be yours, and you do with it what you think needs to be done,’” Lisa recalls.

She’s retreated to the air-conditioned communal kitchen and living room attached to her studio. She shifts in her cane rocking chair. “I was really angry about that answer for a long time. For a couple of years, I thought, ‘You really passed the buck on that. I needed some guidance, and you just left me floundering.’ But eventually, I realized that that was actually the biggest gift that he could’ve ever given me.”

When Sid and Pat opened their gallery, they initially called it Strawberry Fields. They quickly renamed it for nearby Cedar Creek after people kept showing up, buckets in tow, to pick fruit. photograph by Alex Boerner

After Sid died, Lisa thought about what closing Cedar Creek would mean. “But I love this place,” she says. “And really, I couldn’t shut it down. There are so many artists who depend on it. I’m a very small part of this whole thing.”

Cedar Creek is an enormous part of her, though. It’s the place where she grew up, where she became an artist. It’s all she’s ever known — and where she says she belongs. And though Sid has been physically gone for more than 20 years, his spirit remains at Cedar Creek, like fingerprints captured in clay.

On one side of the gallery, there’s a bench made from a flat stone that Sid hauled in from the land where he grew up. It had been a step into the barn where he and his mother hung tobacco to dry. “All my ancestors have put their feet on this rock, and all my descendants will put their butt on this rock,” he told Lisa one day when he was sick. “And when you need me, you can find me here.”

Cedar Creek is also home to six historic tobacco barns that Sid saved from other properties across the state. photograph by Alex Boerner

Over the years, she’s figured out what to do, guided by her dad’s spirit, her mom’s wisdom, and her own intuition. She’s brought more artists into the gallery, added e-commerce, and launched events and fundraisers. She’s hired talented people to run the parts of the business she can’t, and she’s training others in her footsteps.

Her son works in the gallery part-time, while her daughter plans to attend medical school. She’s giving them the same gift Sid gave her: choice. She believes this place will carry on with or without an Oakley because of the strength of the community they created.

“I guess our roots run pretty damn deep,” Lisa says. She gently rocks her chair for a moment. Her voice breaks when she speaks again, about her dad. “I know that he’d be proud.”

Cedar Creek Gallery
1150 Fleming Road
Creedmoor, NC 27522
(919) 528-1041
cedarcreekgallery.com