The careers of two plainspoken, masterful Southern craft artists, 85-year-old twin sisters Cynthia and Edwina Bringle, are the focus of Bringle, an hour-long documentary by Atlanta artist and filmmaker E. Vincent Martinez. Made in collaboration with North Carolina–based Toe River Arts, the film, which screened at NorthCarolina’s Tryon International Film Festival in 2023, is now available to watch online.
Martinez—a former student at Penland who is currently working on a film about metalsmith Elizabeth Brim—tells the story of his mentors Cynthia, a potter, and Edwina, a fiber artist. Interviews with the pair and a galaxy of artists, teachers, and collectors in their orbit are intercut with illuminating footage of the sisters at work.
They began their careers in the early 1960s, when the studio craft movement and second-wave feminism were getting off the ground. For Cynthia, making her way in the testosterone-heavy clay world of the day took determination, but, as she says more than once in the film, she was equal to the task because of her disinterest in “marriage and two-plus children” and her deep love of making pots. Those pots, elegantly shaped, are almost always carved and painted too; Cynthia had originally planned to be a painter. Edwina’s weaving is full of color daring. We see her handling warp threads of blue and purple and suggesting that “by the time I finish I could have orange or gray or black or white in the weft threads.” The energy that these bold color combinations produce leads an interviewee to liken her to Bauhaus legend Anni Albers. A brief scene of the twins walking and talking leads to a discussion of the creative synergy between them, particularly when it comes to color.
The final segment of the film focuses on Cynthia’s half-century at the renowned Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Starting as the manager of its then-modest clay studio, she went on to build its first gas-fired kiln and teach there for decades, eventually earning formal honors and the informal title “Mayor of Penland.”
Five YouTube “master classes” with the Bringles accompany the film. In one, Edwina weaves. The other four are Cynthia’s: two devoted to pot making, one to brush making (she sometimes uses dog hair), and one to her salty tips for making a go of a clay
career.
BRINGLE: A TALE OF TWO MAKERS (2023)
A film by E. Vincent Martinez
youtube.com/@ToeRiverArts
Jon Spayde is a contributing editor to American Craft.
