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.

Creating Texture

 A few weeks ago my niece and her friends came by the studio for a little pottery party to celebrate her 15th birthday.  Before they all arrived I pulled out all my tools for some handbuilding that we were going to do- wooden stamps, rubber stamps, cookie cutters and cutting tools.  I liked how inspiring they all were and started thinking again about how I could bring 'stamped' patterns into my own work. 
It had me thinking back to the work I did in collaboration with my friend Disa MacKay last year.  I don't know that I've posted the final pieces  here, but here's a few of the hand-built with relief patterned vases we made, photographed professionally so that they look really lovely.  The patterns we used were all hand-cut, without using any commercially made stamps.  If I remember correctly, our 'paisley' inspired pieces took the longest and were the most complicated to make. 

Summer memories

We are heading out to Savary Island for a few days for some much needed R&R.  The summer feels like it's just flying by and now that our weather feels summery we want to spend a little time enjoying it before the boys head back to $#*ool (It's a 'bad word' around here this summer:)!
Here are some of the flowers in bloom in our yard right now- so many purples and pinks. The vase is one of the last I have from the collaboration between my friend and designer Disa MacKay, from last year.  And the textile piece is something I got at a thrift store when I was about 18 years old.  It brings up memories of the shed at my parent's place; my sister and I spent one summer completely decorating the inside of it with thrift-store finds and having slumber parties in the loft. I'm hoping we'll make a few summer memories like that for the boys this week! 

The Disa & Heather Collection coming soon...

The collaboration that I worked on this spring with my friend Disa is finally starting to come out of the kiln.  Introducing the first completed glimpses of our handmade vase collection in Chevron and Lotus.  The last shot is our vases in process, while we were making them. I'll keep you posted on the shop reveal very soon...

leaving home, going home

Back when I transferred into Art School as a 3rd year student, one of my first people I met was Disa.  She was taking both ceramics and painting (just like me) and we instantly connected over similar aesthetics and interests.  That was about 12 years ago now, and despite Disa moving back to her hometown of Toronto and then back to Vancouver to do an intensive Graphic Design program, Disa and I have stayed good friends.  Today she and her partner are headed back to Toronto, this time for good, and as sad as I am to say goodbye, I know that we'll have lots of visits between us still to come. 

Last fall Disa and I started talking about working on a collaborative project that we could do together in my studio before she moved back to Toronto.  We had long conversations late into the night over drinks discussing trends, ideas, product design, and ceramics.  In February we had our first studio session and we did some wheel-throwing, worked on some tiles, and then came up with these slab-built vase forms with our own cut out designs that we pressed/rolled into the clay multiple times to make a pattern.  We both felt like these were the direction we needed to go in for our studio sessions together and our excitement about the vases built.  Working in the studio together on these spurred on the idea of opening an online shop of our collaborative, one of a kind vases.  (Coming soon!)

Today Disa is leaving home and going home all in the same day.  I'm thinking of her as she says goodbye to a city she has lived in for over 10 years.  It's going to feel lonely without her around...