...there's plenty of wood and canvas in the typical couch

I think I'm an artist… But I make jewellery and ceramics. I recently made a piece in metals that looks and functions like a picture. And you can wear it if you so choose… A Still Life With Gin And Oranges was provoked into being by the selection criteria published by a big Canadian emerging artists art fair, who excluded anything "decorative" or that could be used. Their potentially apartheid approach to anything clay or textile was overcome by including sculpture in their definition of art (so just to be clear: 3D work must be neither useful nor decorative to be art. Anything 2D is art).

And so I give thanks to ARTINFO for this thoughtful piece on the art fair. I note that the red leather sofa (mentioned lower down in the article) would have been specifically excluded at my fair, because it was, well, useful - and because the organizers also specifically excluded furniture.

A Still Life With Gin And Oranges - picture, pendant, art?
Chased and constructed from patinated brass, sterling
silver, bronze, and some gold. Christine Pedersen. 2011.

Another recent event (reported by ARTINFO) made me gasp in astonishment. I know, must be some really AWESOME piece of art—wrong—it was this quote: "…So I went to the Frieze Art Fair in London, saw this piece and was like, "Oh my god, that’s amazing. I really want to buy that." And the dealer said, “Oh no, well we’re actually waiting for a more prestigious collector to buy that.” - that was Daniel Radcliffe on his initial attempt to buy a painting by Jim Hodges. Fortunately the painter was a fan of Harry Potter, and Daniel got the art that he LIKED. I wonder if the gallery owner committed a major foot in mouth for so openly attempting to position a sale that would make other-people-that-buy-this-kind-of-art estimate the artist more highly? And of course doing their commission no harm in the process.

From the majority of ARTINFO's excellent art info, and the well positioned art fair that much of my work was excluded from, one might infer that "art" is probably painting. I am also led to conclude that this definition is worth protecting for some reason… Dare I say that it comes down to simple economics? If consumers get the idea that other forms of creativity are also art, and are increasingly tempted to buy them, then painting could lose some market share. And it can't just be about materials—after all, there's plenty of wood and canvas in the typical couch.

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obsessing in public

obsessive chasing desire: the process in which the metal artist yields to their need to strike one piece of metal with carefully shaped tools for a very, very , long time. I will be doing a chasing metalwork demonstration at Bluerock Gallery in Black Diamond, Alberta, on Saturday December 5, 2015. I will have loads of samples - flat chased pictures, works in progress - and a very special holly sprig that I have been working on for over 90 hours… Look forward to seeing you there. “Run”. Brass portrait study. Chasing and repoussé. 14.5 x 9 x 3 cms. Christine Pedersen. 2014. ‘ Chasing ’ is the use of tools to create lines or texture marks on the surface of metal, it can be just like drawing. But the artwork can also be made into a three dimensional form by hitting and stretching the metal surface from behind—‘ repoussé ’—to sculpt relief, or volume, into the metal surface. The Statue of Liberty is probably the most famous repousséd object in the world - it’s also an awful l

hello you...

I always keep a piece from a new body of work: I need to spend time getting to know it. #15 “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow: Orange and Red Slurpee” pinched porcelain vase form. Height: 8 inches. Christine Pedersen. 2015. And so #15 stayed with us, and I schemed up a delightful challenge for myself: in the name of art—and pictures for my blog—I would fill it with flowers for every opportunity I could make up for a whole year. Sweet. First up: a lovely (and very modestly priced) bouquet from the supermarket for Christmas 2015. #15 “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow: Orange and Red Slurpee” pinched porcelain vase form. Seasonal flowers. Christine Pedersen. 2015. I always approach a vase thinking about the overall shape, as something to contemplate in my home, because most of the time it will probably stand empty. But as I make the piece, I end up imagining flowers and how they will fill it: how the stalks reach down to the bottom and push off at an angle; how wide a base nee

narrative jewellery: tales from the toolbox book launch

For every piece of jewellery I make there is a story. It can be simple, just a note on the “why?” that led to the forms and textures, or the feeling that I want to remember. Sometimes the single idea that could become a piece, conceived way before the act of making, can become so over-whelming that I need to write a whole new reality for the jewellery to exist within. That’s how it was for “Pull”, the first piece of jewellery in a body of work that became the ReFind Collection *. It caused me to look at materials in my home, especially the things that were routinely thrown away, very differently. It was like waking up to realize I just hadn’t been paying the right kind of attention to all the “stuff” in other areas of my life; realizing that maybe jewellery could be linked to something as obscure as industrial-scale food-processing and packaging—if I allowed my mind to receive the information, differently. I am very honoured that my necklace has been included in Mark Fenn’s new

metal is clay

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