'Contemporary embroidered textiles on the related themes of sailing, navigation and weather'. Bettina Matzkuhn is an embroiderer. She is a painter with fabric, linens and threads. I wondered how she would fill The ACT/Maple Ridge Art Gallery with embroideries so I chose to take myself out to Maple Ridge to see her show, on the Saturday afternoon when she was scheduled to give an…
Just the other day BC potters received very sad news from the BC Potters Guild board's president, Laura Carey. It has been decided that, due to falling numbers of customers at our gallery and ever-increasing rent, the Gallery of BC Ceramics will close at the end of February. The same email invited us to last Thursday's opening for past-president Jinny Whitehead's solo show. It will…
Back in 1973 Alan and I hiked with our newborn son Steve three miles out to Ozette Archaeological site and camped there with the crew. Ozette is on the remote North-Western tip of Washington State, on the Pacific Coast of the Olympic Peninsula. Al had met one of the crew members, Dale Croes, when they were on a dig in Prince Rupert, BC in…
It was a clay-packed weekend! On Friday evening Linda took June and me over to the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts for the latest in the NorthWest Ceramic Foundation's series of lectures. Nora Vaillant had studied Leach apprentice and sometime BC resident John Reeve and his influence on West Coast potters for her MA thesis. This talk was a somewhat extended version of the presentation…
The last few days illustrate how my life is a blend of pottery-related activities, household stuff and days when family is top priority. Last Thursday I finished applying terra sigillata to the undersides of all my pots, fast-dried some still slightly damp plates in my convection oven (on 'warm'), loaded the kiln for the bisque firing and turned it on. We'd set aside Friday for…