metal is clay

  I’m delighted to share that a collection of my porcelain vessels and vases is available from Willock & Sax Gallery in Banff, Canada  and online. Ceramic vessels allow me to create a unique form every time I work. My pieces are inspired by real and imagined landscapes, geology, deep time, and the science of our universe. I make sculptural vessels based in form and colour, functional vases inspired by my garden, and open forms that welcome food or contemplation. I build these pieces in small groups so that each one can grow at its own pace, developing the form a little and then resting the clay. As my hands shape the vessel, the warmth helps to stiffen and slowly dry the material; it’s this relationship with time that allows me to intuitively generate and capture intense textures and gestural details within the clay surface.  This collection includes unglazed vessels that focus on the natural beauty of the porcelain clay, alongside vases with lots of colourful pops of...

Excited to share I’ll be presenting an artist talk on March 28, 7pm, at North Mount Pleasant Art Centre, in Calgary. I started clay classes there in 1996, a year after I emigrated from England to Canada—it was that education and community that helped me develop the skills to set up my home studio. I’ll be diving into my process, doing some demos, and generally obsessing about all things clay (with a bit of metal sneaking in). Thank you to the Mount Pleasant Potters' Guild for the invitation--hope to see you there!

"Shimmy" post earrings in sterling silver and gold-filled chain. "Concrete & Graffiti Series". Christine Pedersen, 2024. I’m really excited to be part of a jeweller’s artist residency this November, here in Calgary, at Sparrow Artspace. Thirteen local jewellery artists have each made 5 pairs of one of a kind earrings for a gallery show, plus there will be pop-up shows throughout the month with lots more hand-made jewellery, drop-in demos of jewellery-making, and a few community workshops too if you would like to try your hand (stacking rings, dangle earrings). You can find all the details on the group instagram (@makersdozen_yyc) and Facebook pages.  “Shimmy” earrings are one of my 5 pairs in the show; I worked with a favourite theme, “Concrete & Graffiti”, named after a large cocktail ring commission I made in 2012, and inspired by the urban landscape: industrial metal, locks, links, chains, and concrete. There’s lots of richly textured silver, stro...

"Blue One". Unglazed blue porcelain vessel. Christine Pedersen. 2023. Toronto Outdoor Art Fair runs Friday July 12 - 14, 2024, and my ceramics will be available for sale exclusively online, find my profile here . I’m thrilled to have been juried into the show, and will be offering work from a few different series, with new work, and pieces from my collection that have never been shown.  Only 10 pieces can be listed online at a time, so please do email me if you see other work on my instagram or Facebook feeds that you would like to know more about.  Online sales will continue until March 2025.  Thanks for checking out my work, and I hope you'll enjoy looking around at loads of great art at the show. Background Vortex vessel. Pinched black porcelain. Christine Pedersen. 2023. Originally from the UK, I’ve been making ceramics in my home studio in Calgary, Alberta, Canada since 1999. My main form is sculptural vessels, as functional and decorative centre-pieces for the ho...

Making a hand-built sculptural porcelain flower vessel: I made four short videos showing my process as I hand-built this form, and I’ve put them all on this post, in reverse chronological order. The piece was built over a 5-week period, to the constant background of news coming from the radio—I’ve shared more about my thought process, and the difficult sources that were my inspiration, at the bottom of this post.  The final video, Part 4, shows me refining the form and details, and cutting away clay supports that have cradled the vessel over the last few weeks. The vessel is now loosely wrapped under 4 layers of soft plastic, and settled in for the long, slow dry before it can be fired. Scroll down for Parts 3, 2, and 1 to see how the form was developed.  2x speed. 🎶 Judson Crane "From The Earth" Time is an essential component in building complex pieces like this; clay will soften as it is worked, and by breaking my work up into sessions of a few hours a day, it allows physi...

Over Christmas 2021, I had a little moment and bought myself a gift: christinepedersen.art —a new web-site . I’ve been watching this project evolve for quite a while, and was thrilled to see that .art was offering an easy to use pop-up artist site builder ; I finished writing all the descriptions and up-loading my images yesterday. And so today I can relax, just a little, write a blog post… OK, back to work! All the not-actually-making-new-art-jobs truly take a huge amount of time. There's shooting photography and video  - then editing the photos and video (including new #shorts on Youtube), maintaining the written statements and documentation, and making social media posts...and if I’m lucky to write some show applications and send work out into the world, I might even have a rare chance to scrub up for an afternoon and share a glass of something nice with you in a gallery!   And I’m not complaining about any of it (even when I want to drop-kick my computer off a brid...