​The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to be sponsoring a special panel discussion on the exhibition and subsequent catalogue Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries recently published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery of the University of British Columbia. The panel will take place on Friday, September 9, 2011, at 7:30 in Room 245, North Building of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver). All are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Thrown was reviewed by long-time PGBC member Keith Rice-Jones in the August Potters Guild of British Columbia Newsletter. The panel will feature a slide presentation and discussion with Director/Curator of the Belkin and co-curator of Thrown, Scott Watson; Emily Carr University Instructor and well-known ceramist Paul Mathieu and Tam Irving, one of the artists featured in the exhibition and the book. This is an excellent opportunity to learn more about the talented artists who contributed so significantly to the history of ceramics in British Columbia.

Thrown (the exhibition), held at the Belkin Art Gallery in 2004, included some six hundred pots and related archival material. It was curated by Scott Watson and Lee Plested, with Charmian Johnson as special advisor. As Watson notes in the preface, the exhibition aimed at recuperating the studio pottery movement as an important component of the province’s cultural history, placing it in the context of the international studio pottery movement of the 1960s. Watson argued further that studio pottery was part of a world-wide social and cultural movement to counter “the destructive trends of our time.” Thrown (the book) includes new texts by Michael Henry, Tam Irving, Charmian Johnson, Glenn Lewis, Lee Plested, John Reeve, Naomi Sawada, Ian Steele, Nora Vaillant and Scott Watson, as well as reprints of historical and critical essays and letters by Glenn Allison, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Herbert Read, Doris Shadbolt and Soetsu Yanagi.

As Keith Rice-Jones asserts in his review, “Thrown is broader and more personal than a mere historical record. It recognizes and celebrates these roots of studio pottery in B.C., enlivening them and making them relevant to a new generation. Whether potters, teachers, collectors or users of everyday pots, Thrown is essential ceramic reading.”

The panel will take place on Friday, September 9 at 7:30 in Room 245, North Building of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver). All are welcome and encouraged to attend.

​The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to present a Curators’ talk by Nora Vaillant and Shelly Rosenblum to accompany the exhibition HIGH FIRE CULTURE: Locating Leach/Hamada in West Coast Studio Pottery. The exhibition will take place at the Satellite Gallery, 560 Seymour Street, 2nd Floor, Vancouver, BC, from May 24 to July 16, 2013. The Opening Reception will be held on Thursday, May 23, from 6 to 9 pm. The Curators’ Talk will take place on Saturday, May 25, at 4pm. Continue reading →

​The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to announce Jim Robison as their featured public speaker on Friday, March 23, 2012. The lecture will take place at 7pm in Room 245, North Building of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver). All are welcome and encouraged to attend. Continue reading →

The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to announce Julie York as their featured speaker at a free public lecture Wednesday, October 13, 2010, at 7:00 pm. The lecture will be held in the IDS Motion Capture Studio, North Building of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver). All are welcome to attend. Continue reading →

The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to announce Jae Won Lee as their featured speaker at a free public lecture Thursday, October 18, 2012, at 7:30 pm. The lecture will be held in Room 245 in the North Building of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver). All are welcome and encouraged to attend.

“Noticing things is crucial to making art: things about ourselves, problems, and challenges. Making art allows us to declare who we are.”

Jae Won Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She absorbed a love of Korean culture from her parents, who taught literature, wrote poetry and translated American and English stories into Korean. She came to the United States to attend California State University at Long Beach and the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where she received her MFA in 1995. Here she experienced a new and foreign culture, mining the on-going sensation of suspension between cultures to produce her labour-intensive and contemplative work.

Her work has been described as “intimate-scaled, reductive, sealed porcelain box forms, as well as porcelain sculpture shaped by numerous small multiple components.” She works in a variety of materials in addition to porcelain including paper, fabric and hair, but all works are characterized by an exquisite sensitivity to materials, pattern, symmetry and decoration. She covers her porcelain box forms with delicate floral patterns, which “inhabit the common ground between nature and culture, theory and phenomena.” She uses obsessive labour and repetition to imply the passage of time, simplifying her forms to focus energy and induce a sense of mystery. Glazed in jewel-like colours, the resulting works are sensuously beautiful and life-affirming. She writes that she would like her “message in its empathy, simplicity and sensitivity to evoke a sense of isolation.”

Lee attended numerous artist residencies including Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine; the Pottery Workshop in Shanghai, China; the Chung Nam National University in Deajeon, Korea, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia and the European Ceramic Workcenter in the Netherlands. In March of 2012, she presented “In Search of Streams and Mountains” in the “New Work” category at the NCECA conference in Seattle. In this work, Lee examines the traditional genre of Chinese landscape painting, exploring both the “actual topography of a grand site and the layers of psychological and art historical meanings that are embedded in the scenery.” She has taught at a number of institutions including Camberwell College of Arts in London, Rutgers State University in New Jersey and Michigan State University in East Lansing, where she has taught since 1998. Her work has been exhibited extensively across the United States and internationally in Korea, the Netherlands and China. She is represented by Paul Kotula Projects in Detroit, Michigan.

The lecture will take place Thursday, October 18 at 7:30 pm in room 245, NB, Emily Carr University. All are welcome and we look forward to seeing you there.

Note: For more on Jae Won Lee, please see her website at www.jaewonlee.net

The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to announce the Australian ceramic artist Gwyn Hanssen Pigott as their featured speaker at a public lecture, free with museum admission, Saturday, November 3, 2012, 1:00 pm to 3 pm. Continue reading →

The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to announce Ying-Yueh Chuang as their featured speaker at a free public lecture Thursday, November 29, at 7:30 pm. The lecture will be held in Room 245 in the North Building of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver). All are welcome and encouraged to attend. Continue reading →

The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to present a talk by Quebec ceramist Gilbert Poissant, “Forty Years of Practice: From Object to Mural.” The lecture will be held on Wednesday, October 23, at 7:30 pm, in Room 245 in the North Building of Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver). All are welcome and encouraged to attend. Continue reading →