Bookhou at Circle Craft

I managed to sneak in a quick visit with Arounna from Bookhou at Circle Craft this last Saturday.   It was great to see a table full of her beautiful hand-screened linens as bags and tea towels!  I'm thrilled to be working on a show involving myself and Krystal Speck later in Spring of 2012 at Bookhou so it was good to briefly talk about the collaboration with Arounna before it all gets started in the new year. 

Arounna and her husband John have a really unique creative partnership that never ceases to amaze me- they work seemingly effortlessly between art and then the more production side of their craft, successfully running a brick & mortar shop with rotating shows and workshops, keeping a busy online store, a blog, an online magazine not to mention their 2 young children!  I try to convince myself that if I owned a store front building in the city with a studio at the back and our home upstairs that I'd be able to get as much done as Arounna and John do, but I'm not sure I could keep up if I tried.

Emily Carr University at Circle Craft

It's the end of a long week and I quickly snuck away from all the studio glazing that's going on to check out booth designs and see what Kelly Austin, my studio assistant from this past summer, has been up to in her last year at ECUAD.  Kelly and I had talked this summer about the opportunity that came up for her and another ceramic/industrial design student, Darcy Greiner, to represent Emily Carr's Ceramics Department with their work at Circle Craft.  I'm not sure that I would have been ready in my 3rd or 4th year to put together such a venture, but these two certainly were.  Their work looked lovely side-by-side, and I was blown away by the concepts that both students were conveying in the way the work was made and the execution of it.  The work is all about forms and innovation in formal design, which is so refreshing to see! 

 Kelly's table setting on an 8 ft long table is stunning!  The simple gradation of gray scale, the stacking of each table setting and the angles of each piece really speaks to her simple and modern aesthetic.  I was also a huge fan of some new work that she's been busy working on.  Rock-like forms with a wheat coloured clay with a stoney pale green interior... WANT.  Also loved her little creamer spout.

 Darcy's work blew my mind.  I will fully confess that from looking at the pie form (photo here) on it's own I didn't get it.  Putting the pieces of the pie together, I sort of got it.  Stacking the vessel forms inside the pieces of the pie in various formations...now I'm starting to see.  Brilliantly, this guy is re-thinking the mold into units that can be re-configured for each slip-cast pour.  Smart molds = smart forms.  Ingenious, people.  I can't wait to see where this guy ends up.  You can bet I'll be at his grad show next year, completely mesmerized at what he's come up with. 

 
So there you have it. I had a lovely chat with my my old ceramics instructor, Paul Mathieu, who, as always, had the brightest orange jeans/ green sweater combo I've seen in a long time.  I realized I had truly missed this man.  9 years after graduating and all of a sudden I wanted to be back at the Emily Carr ceramics studio with all the enthusiasm and delusional optimism of a ceramics career before me.  Well, no, that's not quite true.  I'm glad that some realism has sunk in and that my years of hard work to forge a career after graduating have started to finally pay off:)
Have a great weekend- I'll be in the studio glazing to get ready for my up-coming shows starting next weekend! Yikers!