The mega-size artichoke is so real I want to dip it in lemon butter.
"That's the quality of clay that captures a lot of people," says potter Elaine Futterman. "You want to touch it."
We are staring at the ceramic still life clay hangings by Frances Miller on display at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt. The renderings are colourful with a liquid gloss that invests a humble pear with new meaning. Miller is one of nine Coast potters who have initiated their own show of their finest work to be exhibited from May 12 to June 4. Since most of the potters are shaping a living from their art, one of their aims with this show is to promote their studios, situated from Egmont to Gibsons, using a self-guided tour brochure. The concept for this exhibit came together at a potluck dinner of potters. At a discussion around the table they decided they wanted to create a public awareness of the wealth of clay art on the Coast and raise the profile of local art potters by presenting exceptionally successful recent work. Quality and diversity of work was important. "It was difficult to pick a good representative sample of the work for this exhibit," Futterman says. "I needed to show a variety of forms." She and her partner at Creek Clayworks, Mike Allegretti, share a studio, share ideas and use similar glazes, but Allegretti has recently turned to slab work, making trays, sushi platters and a floating flower bowl. This stylish piece is fashioned from two joined platters; the resulting bowl is filled with water and used to float cherry blossoms. Futterman makes functional ware: teapots, casserole dishes, salad bowls. The ceramic art of Keith Lehman is both functional and whimsical. Along with his useful chopstick bowls and latté cups, he has created a world of 1960s-style outer space images in colours of that era: orange sherbet and mustard green. A ceramic piece, The Mothership, reminds the viewer of a 1950s rocket ship, while the stoneware vases could be interpreted as alien tentacles.Kim Freemantle of Egmont also embraces unusual shapes, though they are found in nature. Her teapot is pumpkin-shaped, complete with a curly stem and handles of clay, while the matching cream and sugar are in the shape of gourds. Futterman explains that some potters like to feel the clay and work their fingers through it, as in Freemantle's case, while others will use the potter's wheel for a different effect. Another artist who works painstakingly with thin pieces of clay is Joanne Copp. Her bowls are aesthetically clean and shapely; their linings are silvered with palladium or lined with gold leaf.
Grantham's Landing potter Jack Olive uses his huge jars and platters as a canvas for whimsical art. Catherine Epps works with ethnic motifs that allow us to see the clay beneath. And Alan Grout presents his high-fired stoneware and raku to round out a visually appealing show. In the same show, across from the nine potters, is another exhibit Submerging, full of terracotta and rust brown art. But these pieces are not of clay. They are hand-blown glass that has been sandblasted and covered in an iron powder that rusts the glass and gives the viewer a perceptual shock. How can anything as delicate as glass feel and look like scrap yard bits, weathered bones or fiddlehead ferns? The artist, Jeina Morosoff from Vancouver, is unique in her art. She was a co-founder of Vancouver's Glass Onion Studio and has been an art instructor at university and college. The Out of the Kiln and Submerging exhibit is open to the public until Friday, June 4, at the Arts Centre Gallery, 5714 Medusa Street in Sechelt.
