Paulownia tomentosa
Ballard is known for her work with nature she has done much with bulbs, plants and seed pods that she collects on walks in her neighbourhood. One notable walk for Alice was “ In the fall of 2005 while visiting Highwaterclays in Asheville, NC, her husband Roger and her stopped to walk their 2 dogs along the railroad tracks, near the river. On this walk she noticed a tree that had obviously sprung up from some wild seed, flung by a pod to a destination unknown. On this tree were clusters of little empty brown pods that looked like two little dimensional heart shapes that were open at one end and attached at the other. She snapped off two or three clusters and took them home to her studio in Greenville, SC. There they joined the company of many other forms collected on walks. [She] loved these forms, shared them with others as she often does when she is teaching but did nothing but admire these special forms for several years. A call to the Clemson Botanical Gardens about this tree revealed that it was in fact a Royal Paulownia Tree (Paulownia tomentosa), an invasive tree that made its way from its native habitat in China. All this time, she was bonding with these little pod forms as her ideas for future forms to be made in clay percolated. The Wall Pod series eventually became the result of this lengthy but rich process.”