From the vault: ceramic sculpture 2001

So this is the last bit of old work that was photographed in May by Curtis Hildebrand- ceramic sculptures from my Emily Carr grad.  The last year I was at Art school I decided to let go of functional ceramics to pursue painting and sculpture in a stronger way. 

My paintings at the time were approached very fresh and intuitively- I would make a wack load of canvases, choose about 2-3 colours plus black and white and then would just paint, without a lot of planning.  Over the course of several canvases, ideas would emerge in the form of shape, line, foreground and background, with marks that referenced the process by which I had painted them.  These circular organic shapes were part of this swirl of a thick brush that came back around- the motion of my hand twisting the paint around in a circle.  This circular motion for me became meaningful, eventually working it's way into the concept of connection- the connections between people, of friends, random connections and encounters on the street with people I had known.

With the significance of this idea of connection creating meaning within these abstract paintings, I decided to make these ceramic sculptures that pulled these shapes into the 3 dimensional realm.  Using a wooden template that I had cut out with a skill saw I made these slump molds that fresh slabs of a black clay body were stretched across.  This method creates volume as you flip around the template and create a slab using the other side (put to sides together and you have a pod-like shape).  Instead of using glaze- I left these pods un-glazed but burnished stripes in them, playing with the subtle glossy and matt reflected in the paintings.   For my final grad piece I hung it all on the wall together, playing around with how the paintings were connecting to each other and the sculpture was connecting to the painting.

In that cyclical way ideas come around, these shapes re-emerged in my early dahlhaus work (and then morphed into to the poppy design). 

Another one for the archive...c. 2000

I hope you are ok with a bit more reminiscing.  You can see more of my old work on this post here.

These were some of the images I showed at the Gardiner Museum when I did my talk.  Sometimes I think it's helpful to see how far a maker can come with their ideas.  I feel like sharing some of this old work here on my blog is a little glimpse into my past and also into some of the decisions I continue to make as a practicing artist today.
  
At some point in my education I was extremely concerned with elevating the status or perception of utilitarian ceramics.  I guess I still am concerned with the value-system that is in out there when it comes to clay, but the work that I did in Art school was interested in the setting that functional pottery was placed in.  So I made a series of ceramic trays and ceramic shelves that were interested in the idea of display and creating a setting or place for this work to exist within the context of a gallery space.  For the most part the trays and shelves held a mixture of sculptural objects along with some vessels- mostly teacups and teapots.  I love making teapots after-all, and the ritual behind pouring a cup of tea ha led me to all sorts of conversations in clay.

This was really the only piece out of all my work in this series that actually made it to the gallery- it was exhibited in the Museum of Anthropology along with some other student's work.  Soda fired, this piece is called 'Tea for Two'.  It's a nostalgic and rather whimsical take on the long-distant relationship that I had with Dean for a year- where we wrote letters (hence the scrunched up 'paper' and 'envelope') back and forth between Winnipeg and Langley (BC) when we were still dating and sorting out what kind of relationship we wanted to have. 

Now you're just work that I used to make: 1998-2000

I won't tell you how many slides I have from all my years at art school, but it's in the hundreds. I spent a whole day attempting to digitize 80 of them so that I could use the images of my past work for the talk I gave at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto (it went well btw!). Digitizing slides is a slow process- especially when you need them to be 300 dpi and fairly high res.  It didn't take too long for me to realize that the slides were pretty bad considering what I am currently used to with my amazing professional photographer that I get in the studio once a year to make my work look accurate, with no big glare from the glossy glaze, and with the lovely faded backdrop.  I guess I've been spoiled.

So, needless to say I dug around the studio to find a bit of work to re-photograph a few weeks ago when we were photographing for the Kindred Show.  This is the work I liked enough to want to keep and not sell, or break, or store in my parent's shed.  Even though I took my first ceramics course at college in '93, I really didn't apply to be in an art program full-time until '96 (I still took ceramics courses in those years though).  By the time I got into my 3rd year at Emily Carr I'd been throwing on the wheel for 5 years. 

 Looking back, I can see that this work laid a lot of the groundwork for my current work- but with some pretty obvious differences.  I used to combine more handbuilding components with wheel-thrown bodies.  I liked these puffy and textured handle along with the enclosed wheel-thrown forms with a cut out lid for a teapot.  I was also really into these casserole dishes where the shapes were really organic with the challenge being to create a lid that had a sense of volume but that also fit an oddly shaped casserole base.  One thing is clear though -I liked pattern, simple shapes and masking out glaze designs.  I've always been a fan of glazing and I think it's apparent from what you see here. This work was mostly cone 9 oxidation- I had transitioned from a really dark clay body with cone 10 reduction sometime between 2nd and 3rd year, wisely realizing the likelihood of me having access to a gas kiln after school was over would be slim. 

I'll post some images  of work from my last year at Emily Carr in 2 installments in the weeks coming up.  I kept thinking about this Gotye song when I thought about this work.  When I look at work that I used to make, I sometimes feel like I broke up with it along the way, where as maybe it's more that I let go of some ideas in favour of new ones.  The interesting thing about being an artist for this many years is that ideas circulate around and sometimes I come full circle back to what I had been working on so long ago.