metal is clay

On his facebook page , industrial artist Cory Barkman has been sharing the journey to design and create unique hand-made furniture and fittings for a contemporary Chinese tea-room. I am going to describe more about bringing the Chinese Plum Tree screen installation into bloom, as I have the slightly scary task of making the 500 chased and repousséd bronze flowers. Chased and repousséd bronze flowers - overlaid to create the feel of the finished Chinese Plum tree branch, loaded with spring blossom. Christine Pedersen. 2017. With so much work necessary to create all the pieces, Cory has faced a serious problem - how to find enough hours in his working life to make it all: "Sometimes jobs are bigger than ourselves, and the sheer volume of work needed is more than one person can feasibly or efficiently achieve on a good timeframe”.  Cory and I have worked on a previous major project - the “Return” tree sculpture for Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation , wi...

Calgary Maker Faire Oct 28 and 29, 2017. Update: Caleb Kraft of Make Magazine shot this video from the LEXM booth * on October 29, starring Kat McLean and me doing all the talking. *Video: If you don't use Facebook, use this link to see lots of videos from Calgary, at makezine.com . To find LEXM, scroll down to video #13 - you will see Cam Farn's huge red-headed sculpture appear behind the presenter. Calgary Maker Faire was a lot of fun - hundreds of makers offering show and tell, and loads of hands on opportunities. Might sound crazy, but I think already know what work I want to show in the LEXM booth in 2018 :) Images: top row, L to R - Reinhold Pinter, Christine Pedersen, Cam Farn. Bottom row, L to R - Jeff de Boer, Cory Barkman. October 28/29, 2017: I will be demonstrating chasing and repoussé as part of the LEXM team of master makers and emerging artists. We will have an exhibition of one of a kind works, commission pieces (with thanks to our won...

Celebrating National Clay Week 2017, new cookbook The Crafted Dish goes on sale online at thecrafteddish.com Canadian Thanksgiving - a perfect day to dish up a new cookbook benefiting thestop.org , an organization that works on many aspects of food security and building community. The Crafted Dish is full of recipes submitted by clay artists, with the food served on their gorgeous hand-made dishes. Creating the book was a zero-cost project, with all of the work done by a fantastic team of volunteers, lead by Carole Epp (she of the excellent clay web-site musingaboutmud.com ). Go SEE some of the recipes - if only the Instagram feed was scratch and sniff... My contribution to the crafted dish is a gluten-free nut butter cookie recipe (hint: if you don’t tell anyone it’s gluten free, they won’t care, they’re good cookies). I offer a grateful nod to all the other cookie recipes I have ever read because I modified and substituted, and went through lots of trial and crumbly erro...

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 ...

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 ...

“Twenty” was a complex piece to make real ; it started by sharing in a dream… What is the client imagining? What can they see and feel? And there it was in my hands, the finished piece: thick, lush, textured, a golden and hefty gem-set brass carabiner, with my thumb flicking that addictive gate-wire! The imagined carabiner had a haptic, emotional identity before material, or sketching. It came to life through our massively powerful human ability to transmit the idea of The Thing between us. Everyone’s a maker when they choose to spend a moment visualizing the thing made, finished, right there in front of them. It’s a delicious first step. And it sends the real-world maker off to find the right tools… And there’s the rub: the idea of the thing isn’t enough to make it real, because there’s still all the mess and details and skill of the making. That’s where the maker or artist chooses to fall into building the dream. This is the "making of" video for a commi...

Whoa! That's a very young me with my skewbald bestie and life-long inspiration... Read a feature article in the Okotoks Feb 2017 C u ltural newsletter. Want to talk horse all evening AND learn to sculpt a horse-head in clay? Sounds like a great way to spend time to me! I am really looking forward to teaching this course - starts March 16, 2017, and you can register through the Town of Okotok’s website here. Punk, Jazz, and Classical: ponies with attitude! Christine Pedersen. 2016. You will spend four 2-hour evening classes making your sculpture, after which your piece will dry, and then be fired for you. During the final 2-hour class, you will decide whether to use paint or glaze to decorate your finished horse-head. This course is for anyone who would like to sculpt with potter’s clay. No experience is necessary—just bring your enthusiasm, and pictures of horse-heads that you find inspiring. I will cover all of the important techniques for hand-sculpting , and y...

Return tree sculpture is on show at the Core , TD Square, in downtown Calgary, from Jan 8 - 29, 2017 as part of their waste reduction month. Close-up on the hand holding the root-ball - the Return tree sculpture is approximately 12 feet tall overall. Return was commissioned by Alberta Depot in 2016. Designed and built by Cory Barkman , Christine Pedersen , and Jeff de Boer .