Artist Statements

Marie Côté

Marie Côté has been working with clay and ceramics, in all their forms, for over 40 years. She interweaves the practices of pottery, drawing, and sculpture, and these contiguous disciplines nourish her imagination and serve as mutually-generative explorations. Marie uses this elemental, earthen material in its various states, including sourcing material from natural environments. In a collaborative manner, she gathers, invites, and works with artists from different disciplines and cultures to make art, using clay, music, and performance to reflect historic and contemporary interests, concerns, and speculations. As Marie says, “What we think of as just mud is actually a matter of fabulous possibilities.”

In 2011, by fortuitous and geographic accident, she discovered clay on the banks of Hudson Bay in Nunavik, the northernmost part of Québec. At the time, the only possible way Marie could make use of it was to draw with it, with her hands. This direct engagement taught her to appreciate, in the most elemental of ways, the infinite horizons of the landscape: its colour, texture, and light. Through this daily exercise–with minimal means and with an open heart–Marie met with the Inuit.

Harvesting clay has since become an important part of Marie’s work and research. This constant source of essential discovery and questioning has taken her to the Yukon, the Semiahmoo First Nation, the Upper North Shore of the Saint Lawrence River, and to several agricultural lands near Montréal, where she lives. The work she produces from these gathered clays allows her to fathom the incredibly rich multiplicity of both the specific and the larger world, whose tangled ramifications never cease to kindle her imagination. Through careful observation and active, multisensory listening, Marie’s work with clay engages her in a dialogue, a multilogue, with people, nature, stories, and dreams.

Marissa Y Alexander

Marissa’s work encompasses various streams, all intertwined by coil and line. Coil gives rise to form, form to edges and silhouettes, and these, in turn, frame surfaces. Through repeated gestures, such as the simple act of making a line, transformation unfolds. Central to her identity as an artist and her relationship with form is her connection to pots. Crafting vessels pays homage to Marissa’s initial encounter with ceramics, honouring both the material and its historical traditions. Marissa utilises the surfaces of pots to create patterns and narratives that articulate her vision—a vision of beauty, envisioning contemporary life. Thinly extruded lines of glaze, applied side by side, meld into intricate compositions of colour, shape, pattern, and texture. The deliberate pace of Marissa’s chosen processes invites the possibility of disruption, allowing for flexibility and divergence from initial concepts. Themes of beauty, femininity, nature, and materiality permeate her reflections, drawing from memories of familial gardens in her formative years. These fleeting recollections are transmuted into enduring reflections of experience. The garden emerges as a realm where the family of objects she creates finds collective existence, blurring boundaries until objects thrive in a shared space. Marissa’s garden mirrors her essence—a vision of an ideal space where women revel in joyful movement or find solace in quiet contemplation amidst nature and one another, providing a sanctuary for Marissa’s memories to endure, engaging the past and envisaging the future.

Amélie Proulx

Amélie Proulx’s work emphasises the constant flux of living things. Drawing upon the codes and techniques of arts and crafts, she pushes the limits of ceramics, while defying expectations and giving way to freedom in her approach. The end result is embodied in evocative shapes that exhibit an appealing fragility. Amélie possesses the rare talent of being able to create a balance between rationality and intuition. She is willing to examine her practice through metonymic interplay or mise en abyme. The sound dimensions that accompany her kinetic and interactive works further demonstrate the artist’s great sophistication and attention to detail. Amélie’s labour and tireless research allow her work to go beyond traditional ceramics, existing in a class of their own.

Laurent Craste

At the heart of Laurent Craste’s artistic pursuit is the decorative object. His research centres on the conceptual exploration of the multilayered meanings of decorative collectibles, encompassing their sociological, historical, ideological, and aesthetic dimensions. This approach revolves around the reappropriation of historical ceramic archetypes. Considered instruments of political power, ideological vehicles, demonstrations of ostentatious luxury and economic power, but also incarnations of emotions and experiences, the historical archetypes of decorative arts consummately provide his work with useful material.

Therefore, Laurent focuses on the inventory of original models from the primary 18th and 19th century European porcelain manufacturers and uses these models as a basis for research on the status of the collectibles. He subjects them to a practice of deconstruction and violent alteration of their formal structures, or contaminates their traditional decorations through a subversive process of subject substitution. These formal and iconographic corruptions, as they reassess the historical, social, political, and aesthetic values of the decorative object, also reveal an intense and ambiguous relationship with it.

Halima Cassell

Halima Cassell’s intuitive understanding of the physical nature of the material she uses is key to her multi-faceted practice. Her intelligence is challenged by every piece; how to integrate pattern with form, deciding on the scale of both–these practical decisions are inspired by geometry, architecture, and nature. 

In Halima’s work, she combines strong geometric elements with recurrent patterns and architectural principles. Her work utilises definite lines and dramatic angles. Halima concentrates on simple forms as the basis of her work, in order to maximize the impact of the complex surface patterns, in combination with heavily contrasting contours.

Her carved sculptures speak volumes of the fluency she achieves–with their playful manipulation of tapering planes, hollows, and voids. Through these rhythmic contours, the viewer is drawn into each piece to discover the frame and depth of each horizon. 

Her work is a visual feast of symmetry and natural beauty, inviting her audience to look carefully and to touch the pieces. She is a master of geometry and rhythm, and she never repeats a pattern. Halima’s work displays technical brilliance and craftsmanship at its best.

Clay is her first love, but her work has naturally evolved to include many other materials: marble, bronze, glass, concrete, and wood—each offering Halima different challenges in technique and scale.

The maturity of Halima’s work comes from her process with layered influences. Her fascination with Mughal architecture, geometry, and African patterns are now fused with her Asian roots. Her work is structured, intense, and invariably dynamic in its originality.

Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop’s work focuses on making visible the invisible, on making tangible the ephemeral, on speaking aloud the unspoken, and on voicing voicelessness. In so doing, she engages with such themes as pleasure, desire, sexuality, memory, and exile (and their concomitant absence, loss, erasure, and silence). Jacqueline’s practice is interdisciplinary and increasingly transdisciplinary. As someone who has lived longer outside of her birthplace of Jamaica than she has lived on the island, she is acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This ability to see the world from multiple psychological and territorial spaces has led to the development of a particular lens that allows Jacqueline to view a given environment from a distance. Because Jacqueline is also a fiction writer and poet, text and narrative are significant parts of her artistic practice. Jacqueline’s recent ceramic work consists of brightly-coloured bone China plates used symbolically in Caribbean homes, and explores how they hid the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.

Peter Pincus

Peter Pincus is well known for work that combines exquisite form and intense colour through porcelain vessels and tile compositions. Driven by inquiry, his practice blends colour theory, the history of decorative arts, and cutting-edge technical experimentation in ceramics.

As an early career ceramic artist, Peter is part of a lively and rapidly changing conversation in which the worlds of art, craft, and design are increasingly defined not only by their distinctions, but also by their similarities and relationships to one another. There is tremendous meaning in the transcendence of the pot to engage in all of these ideologies—as an object of substantial craftsmanship, object of use, object of design intellect, and object of conceptual metaphor.

Peter produces three-dimensional paintings out of pots. He feels the big challenge is to study and make objects that have a distinct location in the home, using our familiarity toward them to instigate new discussions about the role of the vessel in our place and time. Peter focuses on containers that are status symbols saved for special occasions, generally deemed distinct because of the value of what they hold rather than for what they are. But to Peter, in between such occasions, they become canvases that visually illustrate the defining spirit of the times. They are useful as well as opulent, but they can be so much more. 

Linda Sikora

Linda Sikora is interested in the philosophical and the agency of things. Her work explores the dual nature of ceramics—as objects of beauty and objects of use—questioning the blurred line between visual art and functional subjects in cultured spaces. Complex, colourfully-decorated, and often conceptualised in prototype groups or series, her work draws from the traditions of European 18th and 19th century industrial-production porcelain and common crockery, infused with a freedom and lightness that is innovative and contemporary.

Service and display are platforms for culture and behavior. To serve, to display, and to store (preserve, hold) are gestures that are scalable. These gestures occur in close proximity at individual, private levels and at large-scale societal, global levels. They are the conceptual underpinnings of ceramic subjects, such as teapots, plates, or jars. Jars and teapots have been central to Linda’s practice for a number of years. The teapot is more demanding of specific engineering particular to its function, while the jar is a generous canvas, its criteria of containment more permissive. These pieces fuel or act as a counterpoint to other forms or subjects under consideration.

Linda is interested in pottery form for its familiarity and congeniality, its ability to disappear into private/personal activities and places. But this is only one aspect of the work that, through its intelligence of colour, form, and stance, can also excite and awaken attention and thereby reflects back to the viewer their own imagination. Invisible or visible, or oscillating back and forth between these states, the pots foster both attention and inattention.

Donté Hayes

Artefacts are a tangible history, which have the capacity to retain, transform, destroy, erase, and evoke lost knowledge. Donté’s work is informed by researching traditional African heirlooms and initiation rites of birth, adulthood, marriage, eldership, and ancestry, which are essential to human growth and which speak to the greater African diaspora. Along with his interest in history, science-fiction, and hip-hop culture, Donté utilises ceramics as an historical and base material to inform memories of the past. The handling of clay reveals the process and shares the markings of its maker. By using a needle tool, Donté creates individual marks on the surface of the clay, with each strand becoming a collective form. He compares the construction and deconstruction of materials to the remix in rap music and how human beings adapt to different environments and reinvent new identities. The application of repeated texture and patterns on the surface of his sculptures imbue a visual language of memory, ritual, comfort, and a sense of familiarity to the viewer. These sculptures are vessels that are turned upside down, further symbolizing the crazy world we live in. Ceramics become a bridge to conceptually integrate disparate objects and/or images for the purpose of creating new understandings and connections with the material, history, and socio-political issues. These modern artefacts preserve, empower, and document the past and present, to initiate healing and understanding for the future.

Natalia Arbelaez

In her work, Natalia is a storyteller. She tells narratives about her Colombian family’s immigration, the pre-Columbian South American presence, and her American latchkey, after-school cartoon childhood. All of these stories work together to create a multicomponent self-portrait of what it is like to be a Mestizo-Colombian-American hybrid. Mining tidbits from historical research, familial narratives, and cartoon culture, she creates surreal stories in clay, much in the way Gabriel García Márquez did with words, autobiographically narrating history with its ups and downs, its humour, and tears.

For Natalia, making her work is an act of revealing undervalued histories from Latin Americans, Amerindians, and Women of Colour. These identities are lost through conquest, migration, and time, then gained through family, culture, and exploration, and finally passed down through tradition, preservation, and genetic memory. She has found value in her histories and aims to help preserve her cultures by honouring them through artwork.

In Natalia’s historical and cultural studies of lost, conquered, and overlooked communities, she has found that craft and clay belong in her pursuit, and she has embraced it. She relates to the role of the craftsperson, which is often linked to women’s work, working class, and cultural tradition. Natalia’s primary medium, her ancestral terracotta, has historically been considered a lesser material, while the white, glossy Majolica glaze that was brought over from Europe was used as a surface to hide the iron-rich clay body. Natalia uses this material as a metaphor to describe colonization and its impact on her.

Futamura Yoshimi

Futamura Yoshimi invariably draws her inspiration from nature. She has created several series of work over the past decade, with titles such as “Racines” (Roots), “Rhizomes,” and “Vagues de terre” (Earthen Waves). Her sculptural forms are intended to be reflections of nature and are infused with a vibrant, living essence. She uses a blend of stoneware clays and a mixture of fired and raw granulated porcelain to create her collapsed rounded forms that appear both vegetal and geological in origin. These forms are sometimes encrusted with feldspar, and enhanced with cobalt and iron-oxide glazes on the interior that are sometimes iridescent.

Futamura was born in Japan, where she also earned her ceramic education. This background evidently influenced her work—the beautiful transitions of the four seasons, the fruits they bring to the archipelago, and sometimes the fear of natural disasters. Life is greatly related to nature in Japan and one learns to respect it. Now for over thirty years, Futamura has been living in Paris. When she finds even a small leaf on the street of this big city, she feels that nature is continuing to provide inspiration for her work.

When the artist looks at clay, touches it, and even sometimes tastes it, she tries to feel, to sense the secret message of this marvellous material—to understand the power of clay. She seeks to translate that to her work and, most difficult of all, to ensure that this power lives on after the firing process. Futamura believes that clay is not just any material, rather it is something living.

Nakashima Harumi

Inspired by European modernism and surrealism, Nakashima’s blue-and-white polka-dotted sculptures have gained him international recognition. His porcelain sculptural forms are both playful and ominous, with variously-sized bulbous shapes accentuating his twisting, biomorphic forms. As a university student encountering the work of Sōdeisha artists and, specifically, the work of Kumakura Junkichi, it prompted the artist to seek an apprenticeship with Kumakura and to further develop his interest in abstract ceramic sculptures. In 2002, Nakashima began working in porcelain instead of stoneware after an invitation to the European Ceramic Work Center in The Netherlands. As he developed his distinctive style, the blue dots on white porcelain were intended to directly reference the Japanese tradition of Sometsuke, and when paired with his challenging, abstracted globular forms, have found a place in international contemporary art.

Imai Hyōe

Employing the slab method of construction, Imai Hyōe places each element on hemispherical molds, on top of which he uses bands of layered clay to build the form. The cuts Imai makes in the connecting layers result in cracks that emphasise the nature of his clay. After bisque firing, he then applies black glaze to the rim before spraying on an iron slip-glaze on both the interior and exterior of the form. The red colour resulting from his high-fire oxidation firing is now his hallmark. For cut works, Imai then rubs brass on the rim to create a metallic effect. Imai’s work focuses on the texture of clay through the use of minimalistic forms and only a few colours. Unlike traditional ceramics that are designed for viewing close at hand, the artist’s works are created with the expectation that they will be seen from afar. 

Stephen Andrews

"Moon jars” originated in Korea during the Joseon dynasty, and the form has inspired many artists over the centuries. Stephen’s interest in the form is its simplicity, with the spherical shape being open to many interpretations. The artist sought to make a series of objects that used this same form, but was each distinct from the others.

Stephen decided to produce a series of paintings of the cosmos to accompany these moon jars. The paintings can be read as both abstractions and as charts, with different registers of time at play. The individual brush strokes measure out the time of their manufacture like grains of sand in an hourglass. A shooting star’s brief trip through our atmosphere doesn’t even manifest against the backdrop of cosmic time. We barely have time to see it ourselves. When you look up into the heavens, the twinkling light has arrived for our pleasure from vastly different moments. One star's light might be 10 million light-years old, while another star in the same constellation could be twice as old, yet here they are simultaneously in our present.

Often boxes are made to accompany ceramics. In Japan, they are called Tomobako and aren’t considered a framing device but an integral part of the work. Stephen asked craftsman and designer Daniel Gruetter if he would be interested in making boxes for the moon jars. The different aspects of each individual jar were discussed, and Daniel suggested materials and approaches to create a dialogue between the jar and its box.

Michel Dumont

Gitigan mukwa / Garden Bear (2017)

This piece references the chronic pain that the artist, Michel, faces on a daily basis, which is the result of a workplace injury. The Garden Bear is covered in a healing carpet of flowers and berries that are influenced by Ojibway beadwork. The animal has no tongue, conjuring a voiceless scream, but he has a garden with vines to balance the pain. For Michel, art is medicine, an Indigenous concept that flows through this piece.

Porphyry Island Deer (2017)

There is a history of light-keepers marrying Ojibway women on Porphyry Island, from the second light-keeper’s family in the 1890s to the last family to man the light in the 1980s, which were Michel’s aunt and uncle. Porphyry Island Deer was the artist’s attempt to honour this legacy of interdependence and love. He pictured his aunt and her beautiful, thick black hair, which she always kept in a flowing ponytail, holding the medicine wheel, and his uncle holding a lantern. Over the span of a hundred years, the role of Indigenous women as homemakers on the island took on a different meaning. Originally, they lived on the island all year round, gave birth, and buried their children, which is why the cemetery exists on the island. Michel’s aunt was renowned for her bread baking—visitors to the island still to this day remark on her pastries. What evolved over time was that she came to be considered an assistant lighthouse keeper to her husband.

Fur Trade Beaver (2020)

Fur Trade Beaver is covered in symbols of assimilation and vice, with 200-year-old Indigenous designs and found vintage-mirrored tiles that simulate the trade silver bartered from the traders to the Indigenous trappers. In turn, they gave the Indigenous people alcohol and taught them to play cards; the crosses Michel would wager are also a tool of assimilation. The representation of une ceinture flechée (a colourful finger-woven sash, worn by Canadiens (French Canadians) and some Indigenous people since at least the early 1800s) rounds out the tail of the beaver.

FASTWÜRMS

FASTWÜRMS is the cultural project and trademark of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse. FASTWÜRMS’ praxis is a unique polymorphous and poly-disciplinary mutualism “entirely oriented towards an experimentation with the real.” (Deleuze and Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus,” 1980.)

FASTWÜRMS’ raku work is in the tradition of ukaru, the 20th century western style developed by Paul Soldner in California. Soldner coined the term “ukaru” because post-firing reduction and fuming is not a part of traditional raku technique in Japan.

FASTWÜRMS’ raku post-firing reduction is a ritual pyrolysis of stacked cedar twigs, red pine needles, familiar feral cat fur, and witch hair.

The first raku performance was the 16th century Kyoto collaboration between the tea master, Sen-no-Rikyu, and the tile-maker, Sasaki Chojiro. Together they made the first raku ceramics, hand-forming clay into a chawan of enminded matter.

FASTWÜRMS’ witch-craft raku is the handmaiden of enminded matter—nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect.

FASTWÜRMS’ raku purpose is aesthetic contemplation and the witch-wabi woke woad of mind-is-in-all-matter meditation: “...the encounter of one’s mind with Being and the realization that they are the same.” (Parmenides, “The Way of Truth,” 6th century BCE.)

FASTWÜRMS’ raku is actualised witch art. Truth and flawed beauty emerge from the event horizon of chaos and destruction. You can touch it.