metal is clay

"Blue One". Unglazed blue porcelain vessel. Christine Pedersen. 2023. Toronto Outdoor Art Fair runs Friday July 12 - 14, 2024, and my ceramics will be available for sale exclusively online, find my profile here . I’m thrilled to have been juried into the show, and will be offering work from a few different series, with new work, and pieces from my collection that have never been shown.  Only 10 pieces can be listed online at a time, so please do email me if you see other work on my instagram or Facebook feeds that you would like to know more about.  Online sales will continue until March 2025.  Thanks for checking out my work, and I hope you'll enjoy looking around at loads of great art at the show. Background Vortex vessel. Pinched black porcelain. Christine Pedersen. 2023. Originally from the UK, I’ve been making ceramics in my home studio in Calgary, Alberta, Canada since 1999. My main form is sculptural vessels, as functional and decorative centre-pieces for the ho...

Making a hand-built sculptural porcelain flower vessel: I made four short videos showing my process as I hand-built this form, and I’ve put them all on this post, in reverse chronological order. The piece was built over a 5-week period, to the constant background of news coming from the radio—I’ve shared more about my thought process, and the difficult sources that were my inspiration, at the bottom of this post.  The final video, Part 4, shows me refining the form and details, and cutting away clay supports that have cradled the vessel over the last few weeks. The vessel is now loosely wrapped under 4 layers of soft plastic, and settled in for the long, slow dry before it can be fired. Scroll down for Parts 3, 2, and 1 to see how the form was developed.  2x speed. 🎶 Judson Crane "From The Earth" Time is an essential component in building complex pieces like this; clay will soften as it is worked, and by breaking my work up into sessions of a few hours a day, it allows physi...

Currently editing short “making of” videos for “Fire In The Belly”, the metal and clay sculpture I collaborated on with ceramic artist  Robin DuPont . The piece is on show at the Alberta Craft Council gallery in Edmonton as part of the Craft Collaborations fund-raising auction —40 artists have collaborated on one of a kind pieces. See more images on the @albertacraftcouncil instagram feed , or visit  www.albertacraft.ab.ca I’m always curious about how other people engage with all the delicious digital documentation that we have available to us—what impact does it have? How do other people use documentation for their own design process, and is it even necessary to them? I take a lot of video and stills as I work, for 2 key reasons: so that I can share more of the studio process, and because I find I learn a lot by looking through the camera. I think framing images on a small screen helps me to see shapes and character differently, and it has become an important design tool alon...