metal is clay

“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...

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 .

I am just starting out on a major new project. It will consume the next 6 weeks of my life. Immersed in the design stage, I already feel the pull of The Resolution, the conclusion of it all because I - we - can see the finished thing: there is a drawing, materials have been selected. The endless chatter from design and detail and process has started, and sleep is broken. PROJECT PICTURES ? EMBARGOED FOR NOW… T hat doesn’t matter, this is all about the emotions of making stuff, less about the stuff itself. There is a cute meme that floats about on social media, regarding the artist’s relationship with a piece of work over the course of making it. In short, feelings go nuts and change a LOT, and it’s OK to stop reading now. Or… Come on the journey.  I’m talking mainly about creating something new, possibly unknown to me , maybe completely out of my comfort zone—lots of different processes all needed at once, or maybe I just don’t yet have full mastery of a particular skil...

I grew up obsessed with painting and colouring in. And I still have the small tin of Caran d’Ache coloured pencils my gran bought me when I was about 11 - just a dozen colours, but so rich, so lovely. So precious. I purposefully kept them for “best” (which is probably why I still have them 40 years later) whilst having worn out countless hordes of cheap ones, and handfuls of drawing pencils. “Best”? Looking back, I think that response was a teensy bit strange… Why didn’t I just burn through and enjoy them? No money…Worried I’d never see their like again? Maybe I didn’t think what I drew was worthy of them? I do remember that I couldn’t bear to wear them out. And that I was very unhappy if I couldn’t keep paint or colour inside the lines. Hmmm… Go on, let go of the lines... Colour wherever you like! You know you want to. Picture and photo: Christine Pedersen. 2016. I was recently directed to this TED article  examining the value of the colouring-in trend, and as...

This post is about the making of Fluvius Visum , a hand-chased brass panel, and the process of dreaming up its narrative content. I like house-names, they have character. After a quick flirt with Google translate, our family house-name - River View - became the more house-age-appropriate Fluvius Visum . I enjoy the heft and assumed dignity of the (probably wrong) latin translation—it immediately felt more in keeping with the contemporary-medieval design style that I was about to invent as I drew the picture for this chasing study… Somehow the latin provided an anchor for a brass panel that would be laden with narrative and heraldic symbolism.   The form of personal coats of arms follows a strict code (1), and there is overlap with the common historical usage of symbols used to create town arms etc. My research to date suggests there is no undisputed go-to directory for the meanings of heraldic symbols (2), and symbols like “holly” or “horse” have likely acquired unofficia...

“Sorry it was so much bother” “Don’t worry about it, everything I do is bother!” I like to bother about stuff, that’s my day-job: dream, design, then make. Hundreds of small steps and details to bother about, on the way to something new. Along the way, I repair a lot of my own stuff. My friend and neighbour is a: “Please look after my dog” “Who wants cake and mojito’s?” - kind of neighbour. And he broke a favourite belt. It wasn’t expensive, but it is quite lovely: supple, dark Italian leather, with a cast buckle that delivered all the strain of bending over after a big dinner onto a tiny plate of who-knows-what cast metal that is - was - less than 1mm thick. Poor design. Why not just buy another belt? Maybe he should have—but it’s the principle… W e can mend things, and I could share a little happiness by drilling two holes and swinging a hammer to set 2 fat new rivets through a serious piece of scrap brass—that belt now has 5.7mm of quality metal to take the strain. A qui...

At first glance, I thought this picture was of something I knew very well… I read in the article that it is a 1/4" macro of a Tom Thompson oil painting, photographed by Jon Sasaki. When this tiny fragment of the painting is blown up to become a new picture of 16 x 24 inches, it seems to look like a surface I am much more familiar with - the soft, shiny, dry, smooth, rough, cracked - etc etc - deeply nuanced surface of a glazed ceramic work. Jon Sasaki: macro photographic image of a quarter inch square of a Tom Thompson oil painting. 2013.  Close-up photography has offered a very different perspective on the oil painting surface, revealing how different media, and our different tools - brush, knife, finger - can be so different in process, or appear so alike, simply by offering a different scale of seeing, to appreciate what is there.

I think I'm an artist… But I make jewellery and ceramics. I recently made a piece in metals that looks and functions like a picture. And you can wear it if you so choose… A Still Life With Gin And Oranges  was provoked into being by the selection criteria published by a big Canadian emerging artists art fair, who excluded anything "decorative" or that could be used. Their potentially apartheid approach to anything clay or textile was overcome by including sculpture in their definition of art (so just to be clear: 3D work must be neither useful nor decorative to be art. Anything 2D is art).  And so I give thanks to ARTINFO for this thoughtful piece on the art fair . I note that the red leather sofa (mentioned lower down in the article) would have been specifically excluded at my fair, because it was, well, useful - and because the organizers also specifically excluded furniture.  A Still Life With Gin And Oranges - picture, pendant, art? Chased and constr...