moving forward through making

One - lovely - gold ring...for C & M. 14k yellow gold.
Commission. Christine Pedersen.

   December 2020: the last month of a very strange year, a year full of deep reflections. I’ve been working away designing and building new work, even though shows were so limited, because it takes a lot of time to create complex pieces and I want to be ready for 2021! The garden was fantastic this year due to the gardener’s spending a lot of time in it: a stay-cation reflecting on life and the universe, grateful to be able to walk and run in our neighbourhood. I’ve also started to share my studio life on instagram—it’s been a really useful way to stay in touch with friends and see fantastic hand-made original work by fellow makers. OK…it’s actually been hard to stay focused, there is just so much beautiful hand-made work out there! It’s been such a joy to make some new friends on the way, especially while we are all dealing with such reduced contact with each other.
   You can find a huge number of Canadian fine craft artists and galleries on the Citizens of Craft web-site, and they've collated lots of provincial fine craft organisations and galleries who have online markets this year. Here’s a link to my profile too. Alberta Craft Council has started the huge task of getting member work uploaded for on-line shopping, with fine craft from all over Alberta.
   Sending you every best wish for a safe and restful season, and fingers crossed that we’ll be back to sharing much more in real life again soon. Visit me @metalisclay on instagram to stay in touch and see more from my studio. I hope you get something hand-made this Christmas, cheers!

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 ...

will you...?

Artists write stories about their work all the time, and the greatest joy is when that story becomes important to another person. This project was about creating a piece of fan-art for a client (DP) based on their love of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. DP approached Jeff de Boer because he needed to commission a very special golden snitch sculpture: the body would become an opening engagement ring-box. DP had a very special proposal in mind, and the snitch was to play a key part. Jeff and I do not usually make snitches. Jeff is a renowned metal artist and teacher, famous for creating armour for cats and mice , and collected world-wide. Jeff also has an ever-increasing body of large-scale public art projects (…with lots of news to come in 2016!). His web-site is a magical place, full of stories made real. I am an emerging metal and clay artist whom Jeff is mentoring - particularly in the skills of chasing and repoussé - and these skills were to be at the core of makin...

Artist talk on March 28, at North Mount Pleasant Art Centre, Calgary.

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!

metal is clay

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