Ruth Duckworth's Clay Creations

At 87, Ruth Duckworth is at the pinnacle of her career. About 80 of her smaller clay sculptures are on exhibit in a traveling show, now at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. But when she began as a young artist, she had difficulty deciding on a medium.

"I went for this interview at the art school, and he said, 'What do you want to do, drawing or painting or sculpture?'" she told Sunday Morning correspondent Serena Altschul. "I said, 'I want to do drawing and painting and sculpture.' She said, 'No, no, you can't do that.' I said, 'Michelangelo did.' And he said, 'She's crazy.'"

She eventually settled on sculpture and has enjoyed a successful career spanning six decades. Most of her sculptures are abstract, shaped in stone, porcelain and bronze. All of them are untitled. She says she wants people "to have their own fantasy or ideas about it and not mine."

One might think that ideas for her murals and sculptures are born in her studio, an old pickle factory on the north side of Chicago. There, Duckworth works tirelessly every day, making innumerable small models in clay. But in fact, her ideas really take root in her courtyard garden where she spends two hours each morning.

"I like it," she said. "I really get sick of clay sometimes."

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Duckworth was the youngest of five children.

"And four of them were intellectually very clever and I hated school, Latin, grammar," Duckworth said. "My oldest sibling was a brother. He was seven years older. And he said to me when I was about 19, 'You want to be an artist? Be one. I will always look after you.' And two years later he was dead. He was on a ship that was sunk by a Japanese u-boat in the Second World War."

Banned from art school in Germany, Duckworth fled to England. She carved tombstones for a living, and worked in a munitions factory making bullets during the war.

"Because I wanted to beat Hitler. I was very naïve, and my father's Jewish," she said. "I polished the die in which the bullets were cast. And so I was always working with the bullet shape."

After the war she met her husband at a party. They were married for 17 years, but later divorced.

"We had four absolutely marvelous months. And I thought, well, then we might as well get married, no? So we got married," she said. "And the next day he wasn't the same person — changed. And he never changed back again. Part of being a workaholic was due to a not very successful marriage. So you have all this time — do something with it.

In 1964 Duckworth moved to America when the University of Chicago offered her a job. One year turned into thirteen, and yielded her first commission, "Earth, Water and Sky," a mural for the entry-way of the Geophysics building.

"The nice thing about living in America is that it's possible to do some really large things," Duckworth said.

A 16-foot-high sculpture at Northeastern Illinois University is one of a number of her oversized installations. Another one, called "Clouds over Lake Michigan," quiets the lobby at the hectic Chicago Board Options Exchange. If Duckworth is not better known, it is, she thinks, because ceramic art has not commanded the same respect as other sculpture.

But fame has finally found her. In addition to her traveling museum show, Duckworth was the star of this year's Art Expo at New York's Seventh Regiment Armory.

"She is one of the real masters in this show," Holly Hotchner, the director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, said. "So she, in a way, sets a very high bar, [the] standard for the work being made now.

Duckworth's longtime friend and manager Thea Burger said Duckworth's work is unique because her pieces are "serene, beautiful and peaceful."

"I think they're pieces that are very easy to live with," Burger said.

Duckworth's porcelain cups sell for thousands of dollars, and larger works go for hundreds of thousands.

"She's still making totally different pieces all of the time, even at 87," Burger said. "She amazes me how creative she is."

Duckworth said it's hard to identify where her talents lie, but they certainly reside in her hands.

"But it's got to be in your unconscious to start with," she said. "And it's got to be in your eyes. And you also have to use your brain."

Never one to pay much attention to styles and trends, Duckworth sculpts for the sheer joy of molding something in clay.

"I'd like to make one or two more really large pieces," she said. "You know, to finish up with a flourish."