about

life's short:

I have always made... Most recently educated in Alberta College of Art + Design’s Jewellery + Metals program, I am also a graduate food science/physiologist, teacher, and public health researcher by training. As a teen, I worked in clay and rode ponies, one act financially supporting the other, until I left home for university. I never stopped drawing reading sewing making…anything and everything that came my way. I now make as a professional artist, and the pieces are always based on what I love to see, use, and wear. Thank you for reading this far - life’s short, and nothing happens unless we make it.

the longer read... why make?

I focus on small-scale sculpture in metal and clay, sculptural jewellery, and decorative and centre-piece table-works: work that I want to live with in my own home, and share with friends and family, or through commissions. My pieces often include social ideas that inspire or trouble me, and my science and continuing art education feed this - constantly asking "why..?” A new idea often means a lot of research, or I will make new tools, because that deeper exploration of how things work will require me to expand what I am able to express; maybe I will be able to ask something different from my materials and environment. There will be new things to notice along the way—that’s how a lot of ‘the look’ in my work occurs, because I noticed something, and need to push to see where it might lead.

process

I mainly hand-build in clay--pinching is possibly the oldest technique we have, and it continues to offer infinite opportunity. I really like the rhythm of having a number of pieces underway, working with the clay’s moisture (lost very rapidly here in Calgary) and physical ability to hold itself up, so that a form evolves over time. I get to reflect, and respond. I recognized that metal was an essential next material for me specifically because it is so very patient! Pieces can be sampled, stared at for weeks, ignored, returned to with new inspiration. And the material is just as malleable as clay, it just has a different vocabulary of tools.

metal

I love to work clay in low bas relief, and started studying the very ancient metal relief techniques of repoussé and chasing whilst at Alberta University of the Arts. This led to working with Calgary artist and teacher Jeff de Boer for mentorship after college, and we continue to work together. Chasing and metal-forming specifically brought drawing back into my daily routine; line-work is fundamental to designing chased work, and 2D drawings are a great--cheap!-way to capture and rehearse ideas for 3D projects.

I rebuilt my small studio to create a workflow that, so far, moves interchangeably between metal and clay. 

I carve wood for jewellery pieces, and it is an essential material for display and presentation. I work with a talented Calgary sculptor and wood-worker who builds my wooden picture frames, which I can then hand-finish to suit the piece.

clay

For clay commissions, I usually encourage using local clays, so that the piece is really from Alberta. Elsewhere, I tend to explore every clay available, always returning to my main squeeze: delicious white porcelain—accented with strong colours or in the white, and juxtaposed with earthy wood-fired pieces. I develop my own glazes, using wood ash wherever I can for drama and those characteristic delicious, organic drools. 

I love to cook, to grow an edible garden, to share food, and I want that food to be able to stand out, so glazing and decoration tends to follow that purpose. I have created an archetypal design that I am pursuing, “Ones and Zero’s”, that speaks to me of a variety of important influences, and how I feel as a 21st century potter, as someone who has the privilege to hand-build their own kitchenware: the simple straight line and a circle can represent my love of landscape, the sun or moon on the horizon; the motifs can be used to structure the surface of a form, like traditional bands or cartouches; and they are iconic of our digital age, because it’s all ones and zeros. Maybe the decoration includes a digital message? The design holds another important reminder for me, a layer of social comment on the growing inequalities of modern life between the haves and have nots, the ever-widening, unacceptable creation of societal one’s and zero’s because of the gap in earnings, education and opportunity.

inspiration

My work is heavily influenced by having grown up in Cornwall, I lived in England until I was 31— surrounded by massive, aged stone, and intense textures, tudor and medieval structures, richly coloured stained glass church windows. I think that influences the first impression that my work makes, it often looks as old as it is new. 

I bring new tools into the mix--working with digital resources like the amazing open-source design tool Blender, I can create parts that I cannot make with my range of hand tools, in my studio. Digitally designed, cast metal parts still feel most definitely ‘mine’ because it is the ideas that dictate how or why to employ this tool. The process of hand-finishing every piece, hand-constructing pieces of sculpture or jewellery, helps blur boundaries between ancient and modern.

maker community and public art

Nodosaur and Pantodont steel wire-work sculptures in the Grounds for Discovery exhibit, at The Royal Tyrrell Museum. Drumheller, Alberta Canada. Designed and created by Jeff de Boer, with a team of LEXM fabricators. See my blog post about the project.

My maker-phenotype continues to grow because I am part of an incredibly skilled maker community (thanks to Jeff de Boer). Jeff is working on formalizing his career-network of local and international makers, a group who really can make anything when they work together, into a working community (LEXM) that operates like an old-school guild with a STEM-A outlook, and with no limit on the kind of project. I find myself smiling at my luck, that the scientific-analytical approach I gained through university, teaching experience, and public health career are equally valued in this community. It’s a maker's dream: be as good as you can at what you do, learn more constantly, gain skills from each other, and--very importantly--start to mentor to keep these very human skills alive. Who knows what someone I teach might be able to discover?

L-R: Jeff de Boer, Christine Pedersen, Cory Barkman. Installing the Return tree at Market Mall, Calgary. Commissioned by Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation. See my blog post for more on this project.