by Carole Epp | Aug 2, 2007 | Uncategorized
While I’m personally rarely a fan of t-shirts with text on them, I was a sucker for these two craft related ones. The first I got from the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery as a part of a fundraising project they put on a few years ago.
They still have them listed on their site and they’re only $15 and the proceeds go towards ongoing educational programs. I wore this shirt at the Portland NCECA conference and had heaps of people asking where to get one. Even had someone offer me $50 for it. Should have sold and bought a new one!
This “Craft to Live, Live to Craft” shirt is by Toronto Printmaker Daryl Vocat. You can check out his artwork here or find the t-shirt on his propaganda site here. At only $20 a pop (13 for the shirt and 7 for postage) It’s hard to pass up.
by Carole Epp | Aug 1, 2007 | Uncategorized
Call for Entry: en feu* Emerging Canadian Artists in Contemporary Fine Crafts
Deadline for Entry: September 18
The MAM Fine Crafts Collective, in association with the Conseil des métiers d’art du Québec, announces a call to artists for en feu* emerging canadian artists in contemporary fine crafts, a juried exhibition open to emerging fine crafts artists across Canada having no more than 5 years experience as a professional artisan. The exhibition (whose title means “on fire”) will be held December 7 – 22, 2007 at the Salon des Métiers d’art du Québec, at Place Bonaventure in downtown Montréal, as part of Craft Year 2007 and in celebration of the MAM collective’s 5th anniversary.
We are looking for audacious and innovative work in all fine crafts media – we want to show the excellence and savoir-faire of emerging Canadian fine crafts artists. Please submit a current cv, artist statement and up to 3 images (8×10” colour prints or 7×5” 300dpi jpg images on CD) of your work. For more detailed information, please see website
by Carole Epp | Aug 1, 2007 | Uncategorized
Here’s a call for any American craft artists out there. You can see past exhibition highlights and award winners on their website.
Deadline September 20 (Slides Postmarked Date)
Applications are sought for the 13th National Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Craft at the Wayne Art Centre in Pennsylvania. All fine craft media is accepted, and the exhibition will be on display at the art centre from November 30, 2007 – February 1, 2008. For more information check out the CraftForms website at www.craftforms.com
by Carole Epp | Aug 1, 2007 | Uncategorized
The Alberta Craft Council is looking for submissions for its Discovery gallery. I think you have to have an active membership to get a show, but you don’t have to live in Alberta to be a member. Membership also provides you with monthly newsletters and calls for entry, etc. Membership is something like $40, but don’t quote me on that.
Deadline August 30
The Discovery Gallery is dedicated to showcasing new work by well-established and up-and-coming fine craft artists. The ACC is looking for submissions for our 2008 schedule from both Individuals and Groups.
What we need in your submission:
– detailed description & theme of the exhibition and curatorial statement
– cv and artist statement (s)
– time of year perfered and reason
– slides, images and description of work
– number of pieces/artists in or expected to particpate in the exhibition
– price or insurance value range
– name of organization or organizer plus contact information
For more information or if you have any questions please contact, Joanne Hamel at (780) 488-6611 ext. 221 or [email protected].
by Carole Epp | Jul 30, 2007 | Uncategorized
I’m procrastinating a bit about getting going this morning so I’ve been wasting, no, not quite wasting time, having a bit of a search on the internet. Just thought I’d share a few things I’ve run across.
First of all here’s a few links to some Youtube videos about ceramics. There’s quite a few videos if you start searching, lots of junk to filter through, with many unfortunate “Ghost” parodies to avoid along the way.
Ceramic work in Vietnam
Shoji Hamada Pottery Demonstration
Brubacher Ceramics
A Raku Firing
Carving Pottery
Art of Asia: Ceramics Innovations In Clay
Did you also know that in 2006 the Victoria and Albert museum in England put out a series of PODCASTS called Ceramic Points of View. Check out the link here.
Dennis Stevens of the Redefining Craft Blog has also been working with this new technology and you can find a few PODCASTS on his site as well as a Powerpoint presentation of a talk he present in 2006 at the CODA conference.
by Carole Epp | Jul 26, 2007 | Uncategorized
What seems like a long, long time ago as an undergrad student I ran across the work of Scott Rench in an issue of Ceramics Technical and was blown away by his silkscreening technique of getting imagery onto clay. Before leaving school I got a crash course, literally an hour or so, on how to expose a screen and then I was off and running. Well not really. I quickly discovered how difficult it was to properly expose a screen without the proper equipment and my attempts were admitedly quite pathetic. In the end the direction of my work has lead me down other paths which haven’t required a thorough knowledge of printmaking techniques for clay. But I’m still quite a fan of artists who find the means to eloquently incorporate two dimensional imagery into three dimensional (or two dimensional) clay.
Scott Rench’s art has changed quite a bit since I first ran across his work. But his interest in combining new technology and the computer in his process has been a constant. It’s an interesting mix to take such a tactile maliable material that has such a long history and to combine it with new technology that changes quicker than most of us can keep up with and which is also so dramatically different than working in clay, your maliable material being pixels, zeros and ones.
But I think more and more the computer is invading the studio, either as a tool at our disposal for sketching and developing ideas, for manipulating imagery, for accounting and marketing, recording, storing digital images of our work, and for branching out, communicating with and developing our community. The more I think about it the more I realize that I would be as lost without my computer as I would be without my kiln.
In a more recent series of pieces Scott has worked directly with imagery taken from the computer itself and incorporated with other symbolic imagery to create sometimes complex and other times straight to the point statements about contemporary culture.
Check out the Dubhe Carreno Gallery for more images of Scott’s and other great ceramic artists.
Recently Lark Books also published a book on Print and Ceramics. I have yet to get a copy, but have had a good browse at the book and it looks great. As always Lark fills it with yummy full color photos and the work they’ve chosen is really exciting and contemporary. Lots of different techniques are covered.
But of course the printmaking bible to me will always be Paul Scott’s book Ceramics and Print.
A few years back I while I was still a student in Australia I got the amazing opportunity to volunteer with the ANU’s Distance Ceramics Program (an amazing program for artists who want to work part time yet still acquire a degree – I’ll post more info in a later blog.) Paul Scott was one of the instructors for that particular distance school and I got to sit in on the workshop. While I had read his book prior to that, it was amazing to see the techniques first hand and many techniques which had seemed complex became quite straight forward it the end. Beyond that Paul was an amazingly talented, hilariously funny and generous artist, willing to share all of his trade secrets. And the poignant nature of his subversive work has always interested me.
There is a quote from Paul Scott’s catalogue Remember me when this you see which I returned to quite a bit when working on my thesis work with the figurine sculptures. It spoke to what I was trying to accomplish through my own work, the feeling that we are an intricate part of the greater narrative at all times, whether we are aware of it or not. It says:
“I like to make work that provokes some reaction or thought, work that is more than superficial. The issues I deal with are the ones I come across in my everyday life, sometimes close to home, like foot and mouth, or Sellafield, sometimes further away like Israeli bombing of refugee camps, or US treatment of prisoners. But even these far away issues are close to home because we buy Israeli fruit and veg in our supermarkets, we are or can be complicit in these things. I want people to think…”(Dahn, Jo. Remember me when this you se. Ceramics by Paul Scott and from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Cereddigion Museum Catalogue Essay.)
Another great site to check out for interesting work with print and ceramics is Robert Dawson’s Website Aesthetic Sabotage (I love the name!). It contains great work with traditional ceramic print imagery manipulated for a contemporary context.
