​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.