The Materiality of Clay

The scheduling of a clay-related event at Vancouver Art Gallery led to a standing-room-only crowd of pottery folks in the Annex workshop on Saturday afternoon January 14th. I got to the room quarter of an hour early and found one of the last empty chairs.

Al and I took the new skytrain line from Port Moody Centre station and strolled over from the Bay exit. It’s so nice not to have to find a parking spot in downtown Vancouver. I hadn’t been in to VAG for some weeks so quickly saw as much as I could before the talks. Sadly I only saw half of the Walker Evans photography show and I missed some of  ‘Juxtapoz X Superflat’ but I made a point of trying to find the work of the four clay artists I’d be listening to later.

Brendan Tang Manga Ormulu

I was really taken with the Sonny Assu show on the fourth floor. Brendan Tang has been enjoying collaborating with Assu, making ceramic objects related to the theme of his show. I’ll post some photos of my favourite pieces in a later blog. But to acknowledge Tang’s contribution, one of his Manga Ormulu creations hangs alongside Assu’s interventions on the work of Emily Carr.

To see the work of Rebecca Morgan I explored ‘Juxtapoz’,‘ a survey of the most exciting visual art to emerge in recent years, with a heavy emphasis on artists who operate outside the central hubs of the global art world’. San Francisco magazine ‘Juxtapoz’ has featured art that has emerged from the sub-cultures of skate, surf, graffiti, street art, comics, design, illustrations, painting and digital and traditional arts. I need to go back and take more time to grasp the enormous variety of colour, media and ideas. But there was no missing the extraordinary face jugs made by Rebecca Morgan. In a recent laudatory article Juxtapoz magazine calls her an Appalachian Queen whose arresting drawings have her in the forefront of contemporary artists. https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/rebecca-morgan-mountain-woman-on-top/

I found work by the other two ceramic presenters in the ‘Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures’ show. It is the first in a proposed series of survey shows, to take place every three years, featuring ‘the many contemporary artists who make Vancouver a vital and dynamic arts community’. I enjoyed finding work by ‘Raiders’, the artists who’ve painted plates in my studio, including Mina Totino and recent first-time Raider, Garry Neill Kennedy.

Glenn Lewis

Glenn Lewis’ pots, made on recent residencies in Japan, are displayed on specially made wooden boxes.  Above each is a photo he has taken of Japanese locations. I did not take a photo of work by Derya Akay as I found it difficult to tell which of the objects hanging from his installation were ceramic.

There’s no point in taking photos in a slide show. Each of the four artists were invited to discuss their work and the idea of the Materiality of Clay for roughly half an hour but there was very little time for questions or more of a group conversation on the topic. Brendan gave a clear explanation of his background, his career and how he came to be collaborating with Sonny Assu in the current VAG show. Currently a sessional instructor in the Ceramics dept at ECU he is clearly an excellent educator.

the four speakers

Rebecca Morgan showed us her astonishingly detailed and huge drawings. From rural Pennsylvania, she calls herself a draughtsman who always wanted to be an artist but who uses her contrasting background of disapproving local inhabitants in her home area and her new life, living in and showing her work in New York, as rich material for disturbing portraits. The ugly face jugs of Appalachia and the South are full of mystical meaning and tradition for her and she described how much she is enjoying the malleable quality of clay coil-building and bright glazes as a complement to her painstaking drawings.

Rebecca Morgan

 

 

 

 

Glenn Lewis, a long-time fixture in the local art scene, apprenticed with Bernard Leach in St. Ives decades ago. He took many years away from clay while he was involved with performance art and was a co-founder of the Western Front Art Collective in the seventies and then spent some 25 years market gardening on the Sunshine Coast. Recently he has returned to making pots and has been a resident artist back in St. Ives and in Japan. So his slides and talk did address the afternoon’s topic and he made a case for hands-on making in this digital age, and commented on the lack of ceramics in Vancouver art galleries.

The final speaker, Derya Akay, a Vancouver resident originally from Turkey and recent Emily Carr U graduate, showed slides of his current practice and mentioned the fact that he sometimes uses what he calls blobs of clay, coloured and fired and suspended with other random items. His talk struck me as less satisfying than the others as he did not demonstrate any great knowledge or understanding of the medium.

The idea of exhibiting ‘ugly’ work came up from the audience and Rebecca and Derya justified it but I was gratified to hear Glenn not agreeing and Brendan quite clearly stating that he is interested in creating beauty. Hooray!

Gillian McMillan

Gillian writes blogs about ceramics in and around Vancouver and sometimes talks about other Art, her garden, travels and family.

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