metal is clay

  On show at BEX Vintage and Mr Mansfield Vintage in downtown Calgary. I’m honoured to be sharing their art wall with Lisa Brawn’s stunning woodcuts this May--and you can find more work from local artists amongst the mid-century modern and vintage goods. It’s always fun to walk into a shop and find that you covet lots of their stuff…it’s making me feel very much at home! BEX Vintage & Mr Mansfield Vintage 1124 10 Ave SW, Calgary, Alberta, CANADA The ‘Archean Spring’ group of vessels and vases is the result of everything, everywhere seeping in as I added glaze colours to a group of hefty porcelain forms, weaving it around their intense textures. I was capturing a feeling that I, or maybe the rest of the world, might just melt or explode…listening to the news, waiting for spring.  The colours are molten, and layered—like a young Earth, back when the oceans were far more green, less blue. A period when the chemistry of colour changed through fluctuating oxygen levels, aster...

  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...

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...

“Open Vessel”, 14” long, Southern Ice porcelain. Survived the bisque firing—phew—now ready for a high temp firing to mature the clay. Everything takes time…make, dry, fire, fire again. And there’s a lot of sampling. Some pieces will unfortunately fail, but they all provide information. All this process tries to make next time go better, to feel more informed. But these are raw materials and their character changes, even with refined minerals, making ceramics a pretty harsh teacher. It's a journey, and to quote Tony Nadal, tennis legend Rafa Nadal’s uncle/coach: “Stay humble, stay hungry”. The sample: “Skiff”, un-glazed sculptural porcelain vessel, cone 10 fired, and ready to go out in the world. Skiff—deep in the kiln, in amongst endless glaze tests, on the bottom shelf of the last glaze-firing. That orange sample in the centre is incredible, going to be seeing a lot more of that colour…  

I made this video for the makeanddo virtual film festival at The Ceramic Congress 2021. It's an intro to the cheap and quick ‘jigs’—workshop devices that hold parts for you—that I made to give myself some extra hands while building “Pool”, a porcelain and metal sculpture. The sculpture is still a work in progress, I keep working on other projects and sneaking back to it, good thing that metal-work is so patient! You can watch the whole film festival on Youtube .  The film was edited by the very talented—and insanely productive—Carole Epp at musingaboutmud . Thank you Carole, awesome job! 🙏👏 Follow along with me in the studio @metalisclay on instagram   #ceramicsculpture #porcelain #themakingof #organicceramics #contemporaryporcelain #crunchyporcelain #contemporaryporcelainvessel #ceramiclife #pinchypinch #contemporaryceramicvessel #studioceramics #canadianceramics #benchpeg #benchtips #intheworkshop #wip #inthestudio #metalwork #canadianmetalsmith #vmaamember