love at first sight

I'm sure it happens all the time to other artists, but this was my first time: I had that instant feeling of "I have to make work for this show".

So I dropped everything, and chased horses.

I had a blissful summer, working away in the basement, and the result is “In Dreams”, a 17-piece installation now on show in the Alberta Craft Council's “Well In Hand” exhibition. This is a multi-artist show in the large, downstairs Feature Gallery space, and there is a really exciting range of scales and themes in the work. Life-sized figurative sculpture, jewellery, artwork for the walls and home, and conceptually-based work: it is clear from the artist's statements that the welfare and protection of the horse in society is on everyone's mind. Very gratifying that we are all, first and foremost, horse-lovers.

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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 ...

Fresh from the Maker's Dozen: earring show, demos, and classes at Sparrow Artspace, Calgary, November 2024

"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...

#GroundsForDiscovery - a series of unlikely events, and how science and art work together beautifully

This begins about 110 million years ago with the death of an 18-foot long armour-plated ‘lizard’, some time after it had enjoyed a large salad. Six years ago the fossilized animal re-surfaced at Alberta’s Suncor Millennium Mine, as an excavator dug down to recover the bituminous remains of prehistoric plants and animals in the tar-sands layer. The Royal Tyrrell Museum and National Geographic hail the dinosaur fossil as the finest specimen of its kind in the world—it is the best preserved, with armoured plates and even some skin tone visible. It is also the oldest dinosaur ever found in Alberta. As yet un-named nodosaur fossil. Photo: Kristi Van Kalleveen. #GroundsForDiscovery See the nodosaur fossil up close in this beautifully photographed essay from National Geographic , published in the June 2017 edition. All of the Grounds For Discovery exhibit fossils were accidentally discovered during mining and excavation work in Alberta. As the Tyrrell specimen fact sheet ...

metal is clay

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