2022 Vol.2 - Alberta Craft Magazine

CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF CULTURE IN THE MAKING

ALBERTA CRAFT COUNCIL PUBLICATION

Become an Alberta Craft Council Member!

You belong here! Join our community of Fine Craft in Alberta. We are Craft artists, makers, designers, supporters, customers, collectors, educators, writers, curators, administrators and more. Show your support for the Alberta Craft Council’s work as a member-based, nonprofit Provincial Arts Service Organization dedicated to developing the careers of Alberta Craft artists and the sector.

We have a few different membership levels, here’s quick breakdown! Craft Lovers is perfect for customers and supporters who love Fine Craft, you will receive a 10% discount in our Shops, a subscription to Alberta Craft magazine, and advance notice on special events. The next level is our General membership, you receive all the perks of a Craft Lover plus our in depth bi-weekly e-news with sector updates and opportunities, listing on our member directory, free professional development programming, and exhibition opportunities. The Professional membership level (or Emeritus for senior professionals) receive all the perks listed above and is for artists who are interested in professional development, applying to become an artist in our shops, adding a profile to the national Citizens of Craft online directory, and other promotional and professional opportunities. Business and Organizational members support the development of Fine Craft in Alberta, these members receive Alberta Craft magazine bundles, referrals for artists and networking opportunities, reduced advertising rates, listings in our member directory and bi-weekly e-news, and are eligible to create a profile on the national Citizens of Craft online directory. We also offer free student memberships, learn more about memberships on our website at: www.albertacraft.ab.ca/member-benefits

ALBERTA CRAFT MAGAZINE

It is our intent to have the Alberta Craft Magazine published twice a year and stay at an expanded 40 pages (up from 24) to include more images from our exhibitions and create more space to cover Craft happenings around Alberta. The next issue is already underway. For up-to-date information on current exhibitions, events, online artists talks and interviews please follow us on social media channels and sign up for our free customer newsletters, or become a member today.

The Alberta Craft Magazine makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information contained herein but assumes no liability in cases of error of changing conditions. Any business relation or other activity undertaken as a result of the information contained in the Alberta Craft Magazine, or arising there from, are the responsibility of the parties involved and not of the Alberta Craft Council.

The Alberta Craft Magazine is now a proud member of the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association.

ALBERTA CRAFT COUNCIL

EDMONTON LOCATION

10186 – 106 Street. Edmonton, AB, Canada T5J 1H4 Tuesday – Saturday 10am - 5pm Shop 780-488-5900 | Main Office 780-488-6611 E-mail acc@albertacraft.ab.ca

CALGARY LOCATION - cS PACE

1721 – 29 Avenue SW, Suite #280 Calgary, AB, Canada T2T 6T7

Wednesday – Friday 11am - 5pm Saturday 10am - 5pm 587-391-0129

STAFF

EDMONTON

Executive Director - Jenna Stanton

Gallery Shop Coordinator - Rael Lockwood

Exhibitions & Memberships - Jill Allan

Fund Development & Special Projects - Saskia Aarts Digital Content & Marketing - Ana Ruiz-Aguirre Financial Officer - Wendy Arrowsmith Gallery Shop Assistants - Jen Harris, Anna Wildish, Zoe Kolodnicki

CALGARY

Gallery Shop Coordinator - Corinne Cowell

Outreach, Events & Volunteers - Jill Nuckles

Gallery Shop Assistant - Melanie Archer

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Chair Natali Rodrigues (Calgary)

Past Chair Tara Owen (Calgary)

Vice Chair Dawn Detarando (Red Deer)

Treasurer Meghan Wagg (Edmonton)

Directors Mary-Beth Laviolette (Canmore), Dawn Saunders-Dahl (Canmore), Kari Woo (Cochrane), Jennifer Salahub (Calgary), Chary Woods (Edmonton), Kayla Gale (Calgary, AUArts Student Liaison)

MAGAZINE

Check out our expanded

Members Directory!

We’re upgrading our members directory. With over 450 members across the province visit the Alberta Craft Council’s online Members Directory, a wormhole of artists profiles, websites, and social media channels to keep you scrolling and engaging with Alberta’s creative Craft artists. We believe that contemporary and heritage Craft provides a true reflection of Alberta’s culture, join us in celebrating and nurturing the exceptional craftspeople active in our province today.

Snapshot artists from the directory: Kenton Jeske in Edmonton, AB.

www.kentonjeskewoodworker.ca

Editor: Jenna Stanton

Design and Layout: Laura O’Connor

Contributors: Jenna Stanton, Jill Allan, Saskia Aarts, Rael Lockwood, Jen Harris, Michele Hardy

The Alberta Craft Council is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing Alberta Craft and the Alberta Craft Industry.

www.albertacraft.ab.ca

FUNDING AGENCIES & SUPPORTERS

Photo by: Corey Johnn

This volume of Alberta Craft magazine spotlights our 2022 feature exhibition Craft & Science, this national exhibition highlights 15 Craft artists who approach the theme in a variety of ways. From artists inspired by or using scientific methods in their processes, to those working directly with scientists, and artists with scientific careers. It’s an exciting mix. Be sure to head to our website’s exhibition page for additional content such as our Pecha Kucha Craft & Science artists talks.

Our Craft Tours continue to expand, strengthening networks between makers and engaging new audiences connecting through Craft. They also importantly create new revenue streams for our organization and artists, and help us develop stronger collaborative opportunities with artists and partner cultural organizations.

This summer we received a Calgary Arts Development grant for $20 000 in support of developing our Craft Tours in the Calgary area as an important part of our new business initiatives and recovery from covid’s impact on the arts. Most of this new money is allocated to paying artists professional fees for Craft Tours and workshops. The funding also helps us with season 2 of our Culture in the Making Podcast produced in partnership with Calgary musician and CKUA CJSW DJ Erin Ross, and in developing important video content to promote Craft Tours and artists to a wider audience.

Craft Tours provide our organization a great opportunity to collaborate with other cultural organizations, generating deeper ongoing partnerships and community. A great example of this is with the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary. Our staff have increasingly worked together to coordinate many collaborative Craft Tours from behind the scenes of their collections, to regular Nickle Galleries exhibition tours with artist workshops. In this volume of Alberta Craft we highlight the Nickle’s latest Craft exhibition Prairie Interlace with an article from Nickle Galleries Curator Michele Hardy. This landmark exhibition is not to be missed, and has several events including a few Craft Tours and online talks (see pages 38-40).

Conversations with Prairie Interlace Curators Michelle Hardy and Julia Kruger about the importance of Craft archives in the building of this exhibition, and the ACC prioritizing the digitization of our archives, led to a generous offer to digitize Alberta Craft magazine’s 40 year archive as part of their projects budget. We look forward to sharing this new resource in the months ahead, and are grateful that the work of digitizing this publication has been done to preserve our Craft history and make it more accessible to share with future researchers. There are many craft stories and histories that have yet to be told, and providing digital word searchable access to our history of Magazines, articles, exhibitions, and makers will ensure that the threads are easier to find, and pull together the important history and stories of Alberta Craft and its makers.

Another ongoing partnership that we are strengthening through Craft Tours is with Portage College and their Aboriginal Arts Program. This past June our board and staff participated in a three-day Craft Tour to the campus in Lac la Biche. You can read more about our visit on page 5. We look forward to inviting artists and Craft curious customers along for a multi day Craft Tour to Portage and Métis Crossing being planned for spring/summer 2023.

We look forward to seeing you in person on our many upcoming Craft Tours in our galleries, shops, and events.

Jenna Stanton Executive Director

On the cover: Curiosities: Pairing #2 by Jane Kidd, Salt Spring BC, 2013. Woven tapestry. Read about Craft and Science on page 6 - 19.

Supporting Culture in the Making

On behalf of the Alberta Craft Council board, staff, and community of artists and supporters we would like to extend our deepest gratitude and appreciation to Tara Owen for her dedicated volunteerism and achievements as our long serving board Chair. Tara’s stewardship, leadership skills, and positivity are just the tip of the iceberg as to the qualities and aptitudes that have made her an invaluable Board chair.

The Alberta Craft Council community aren’t alone in recognizing Tara’s leadership, as a further testament Tara was awarded the inaugural Rozsa Award for Excellence in Board Leadership in 2019. This provincial award included a $10 000 award to the Alberta Craft Council for staff and board development, consultations from experts in the field, leadership benefits for Tara, and the wider recognition she has certainly earned & deserves.

Tara’s skills and generosity have seen her role at the Canadian Crafts Federation expand from Alberta representative on the Board to her current role as Board President. The Canadian Crafts Federation is our national advocate and an important umbrella organization for the Provincial and Territorial Craft Councils.

Tara will remain on the Alberta Craft Council board as Past Chair, while board member Natali Rodrigues steps into the role of Board Chair.

I first joined the board in 2000, as a young emerging artist and learned a lot from the passionate, dedicated, and visionary people on the board and staff. In 2006 I moved into the Vice Chair role, and in 2013 became Chair. The energy and important advocacy work drew me in, and the incredible common vision and clear mandate kept me there. In thinking of my impact on the organization, I am proud to point to the governance and sustainment planning that I led and the engagement and change management skills I used in order to maintain a stable and responsive Council during times of immense change.

I cannot overstate how extraordinary this organization is, and its invaluable impact to the craft community and cultural sector in general. Over the past 40 plus years, the ACC has positioned itself as an important forward-thinking leader in the arts, and a connecting hub where artists, advocates, collectors, curators, historians, makers, doers, and thinkers all come together to create something bigger than themselves.

I am grateful for every moment that I’ve had working directly with the smart talented people on the ACC board and staff. It has been an honour and a privilege to serve the community as Chair of the Alberta Craft Council – thank you for continuing to support this organization through the next iterations and into new adventures.

Now that I’m at the end of my time in this role, I look back with gratitude, to have been afforded the opportunity to work so closely within this awesome community of like-minded and passionate people. I’ve made lifelong friends, and I’m proud to think that I’ve left behind a positive and lasting legacy. It is with a fond farewell that I retire from the Chair role. - Tara Owen

Natali brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to this role. Graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) with a BFA in Glass and a Masters of Arts (Glass) from Australian National University. Her research investigates the experience of liminal space and transformative experience, which finds voice through two distinct making practises: drawing and glass.

Natali is an Associate Professor in the Glass Program at the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly ACAD). As a post-secondary educator and as president of the AUARTS faculty association, Natali ensures the Craft Council is relevant and visible to emerging Crafts people and the broader sector. Natali also brings international experience as the recent President of the International Glass Art Society.

Left to Right: Executive Director Jenna Stanton, Board member Jennifer Salahub, past Board member Kristofer Kelly-Frère, Board member Tara Owen, Board Chair Natali Rodrigues, Let it Snow 2018, Calgary, Photo by: Jeff Yee

The Craft Council board is excited to announce Natali Rodrigues as our new Board Chair

Portage College Craft Retreat

In June 2022, after two years of postponing due to covid, the Alberta Craft Council visited Portage College in Lac la Biche for a staff and board retreat to learn more about the Colleges renowned Aboriginal arts program, meet staff and students, and tour the world class collection in the College’s Museum of Aboriginal Peoples’ Art and Artifacts with instructor Ruby Sweetman, Chief Curator Joseph Sanchez, and Donna Feledichuk.

It was an honor to have the opportunity to learn more about the programs at Portage, visit the incredible Museum collection and have two days of hands-on learning creating birch bark baskets and quill work with artist and Portage instructor Ruby Sweetman. Ruby is a patient and knowledgeable teacher and an incredible artist.

Ruby’s work has been featured in recent Alberta Craft Council feature Exhibitions Cultivate Instigate on post-secondary Craft programs in Alberta and Re:Consider on Craft and sustainability. Our Board and Staff were grateful to spend the time learning with Ruby.

The staff and board are all looking forward to returning for more Craft Tours and workshops, and to see the plans for the Museums expansion at the College come to fruition through the dedication of the community of staff and artists at Portage.

The group of Craft Council board and staff continued their retreat to Métis Crossing on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River near Smokey Lake, Alberta. Métis Crossing is the first major Métis cultural interpretive destination in Alberta, created as a place for Métis people to share Métis stories and cultural learning, with a newly opened Cultural gathering centre and 40 room Lodge. www.metiscrossing.com

The Craft Council is working to develop a multi-day Craft Tour for artists and the Craft curious to visit Portage and Métis Crossing for the spring/summer 2023. Stay tuned to your e-news, members will have first dibs!

Top to Bottom: Porcupine quills

Hands-on learning creating birch bark baskets with quill work decoration with artist and Portage instructor Ruby Sweetman

Finished birch bark baskets

Back row: Instructor Ruby Sweetman with her eager students Jill Nuckles, Natali Rodrigues, Tara Owen, Jenna Stanton, Zoe Kolodnic, Wendy Arrowsmith, Jill Allan, John Krizan, Saskia Aarts

Front row: Kayla Gale, Corinne Cowell, Jen Harris.

Craft and Science

Alberta Craft Feature Gallery - Edmonton: March 5 - July 9, 2022

Alberta Craft Gallery - Calgary: August 6 - November 5, 2022

“As an archaeologist who specializes in Indigenous ceramics, I look to Nancy [Oakley] to help me decode what I am seeing in archaeological ceramics. Nancy has made reproductions of the [ceramic] artifacts I study. The processes she undergoes help me to understand what skills would have been needed to make the pottery, where people would have gone for the materials, and how many people would have been needed for the process. I can take Nancy’s experiences and apply them to the past to get a better understanding of why people made the choices they made. Archaeologists have not always used these kinds of experimental techniques to understand their subject matter, and as a result, we have gotten it wrong a lot. I have been extremely fortunate to have Nancy to help me conduct better, more evidence-based archaeology. “ - Cora Woolsey PhD Archaeology

The Craft and Science exhibition showing at both the Feature Gallery in Edmonton (March 5 –July 9) and Calgary’s Alberta Craft Gallery (July 23 – Nov 5), is an exploration of the intersections between Science and Craft. As we prepared the call, we asked ourselves the following questions:

How do these two practices influence and support each other? In what ways has/does science impact the ways we work as craft artists? How does working with a craft artist improve scientific research? How does scientific research inspire craft artists? What are the similarities and differences between the two fields? What is the role of imagination in science? What is the role of structured method in craft?

Both are efforts to learn; to question and test what we already know through trial and error. Both serve to expand our understanding and appreciation of the environment and materials around us. Through haptic activity craft artists become experts about their materials and form, relying on traditional methods and knowledge as groundwork for further discovery and expression. Likewise, scientists study traditional methodologies and a cannon of historical research in order to push forward to new understanding and revelation. Both scientists and craft makers begin with an imagined goal or a problem to solve and set out to prove and test their ideas. Can you think of an example from your experience of how craft and science intercept?

Craft makers look to scientific and technological advances to improve their results with the materials and methods they use and to reduce their footprint on the environment. Through science we have arrived at a new understanding of the effect that craft processes have on our bodies and environment. As we learn and better understand our materials and processes, do our ideas and imaginations about new possibilities and future works grow? Scientists sometimes invite artists to collaborate in their research in order to have a different perspective and to benefit from the experience that comes from dedicated studio time, empirical knowledge. How do these working relationships change and improve outcomes for researchers? Does a craft perspective also contribute some poetry to the outcomes of scientific research?

In the Craft and Science exhibition we have examples of craft artists and researchers working together, craft artists who have been influenced and inspired by science and scientists, craft artists exploring imaginary science and craft artists whose works are used in scientific applications and for scientific explorations. While we have many and varied approaches represented in the exhibition there are yet many more in existence. With the push towards STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programming in schools it seems as though these connections and collaborations are being ignored. Post-secondary educational programs incorporating science and art together do exist at schools such as Vicarte in Protugal, MIT in Massachusetts, the University of Baroda in India, the University of Washington and Stanford University in California.

Perhaps through advocacy from artists, more educational programs will adopt the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) model for students at a younger age, and the bonds between the Arts and Sciences will become stronger and more frequent allowing for fuller understanding to flourish.

To view the online exhibition and artist talk visit albertacraft.ab.ca/feature-gallery

Sarah Ritchie, Bumble Bee, Bombus sp., illustration for press mold

High Fire Entomological Vase

Sarah Ritchie Calgary AB

My practice as an artist heavily incorporates imagery and themes of natural history. High Fire Entomological Vase is a wheel-thrown vase featuring 30 unique insect appliques. The circumference of the piece features species from 12 insect orders as a small representation of the megadiversity within insect taxonomy. The arrangement of these ‘specimens’ across the body of the vase is in part a reference to natural history collections which both historically and contemporarily have, and continue to, enhance our understanding of biological diversity and taxonomy. My personal objective in creating this work is centrally motivated by how I can incorporate my academic background in sciences into art in a meaningful way.

a. Viceroy Butterfly, Limenitis archippus b. Stag Beetle, Lucanus cervus c. Emperor Gum Moth, Opodiphthera eucalypti d. Firefly, Phontinus sp. e. Darner Dragonfly, Aeshna. sp e. Darner Dragonfly, Aeshna. sp f. Atlas Moth, Attacus atlas g. Comet Moth, Argema mittrei h. White-lined Sphinx Moth, Hyles lineata i. Death’s Head Moth, Acherontia sp. j. Giant Red-Wing Grasshopper, Tropidacris cristata d. Firefly, Phontinus sp. d. Firefly, Phontinus sp. k. Weevil, Otiorhynchus sp. l. Annual Cicada, Neotibicen sp. m. Mayfly, Rhithrogena sp. m. Mayfly, Rhithrogena sp. n. Luna Moth, Actias luna o. Earwig, Forficula aricularia View

High Fire Entomological Vase, 2021, ceramic

Photo by: Matthew Huitema

Drinking Light

Leah Kudel Edmonton AB

Plasma neon is touch sensitive. When you touch the glass form containing plasma neon gas in Drinking Light, the light goes towards you completing the circuit; you create a path of least resistance for the electricity inside. This cup is a prototype that articulates the feeling of drinking light.

‘Drinking Light’ is a part of my artistic research and inquiry into how handblown craft objects can be interactive and influence human behavior. I am continually fascinated with the social sciences, specifically psychology and sociology. The way in which people interact and interpret their surroundings is a major theme in my art. I often ask myself whether a craft object can influence how you move around in space and interact with the world around you? Can a craft object make you feel connected? Do craft and science have the ability to influence the way you see and process life?

When we look to physics, we learn that light itself is essentially electromagnetic radiation that the human eye can perceive. The main source of light on earth is the sun. Therefore, because of our need for the sun, we are in a sense drinking light every day.

Plasma is a hot ionized gas containing positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons. Different from gases, liquids and solids plasma is considered the fourth state of matter and is the most common form of matter in the universe.

FIG 1

Teresa Johnston Calgary AB

I have always been attracted to Victorian-era naturalism and natural history museums. At the turn of the century, the “everyman” housed huge collections of specimens: flowers, insects, fossils, and of course taxidermy. Actual specimens were studied and put on display and acted as status symbols in affluent Victorian homes, much like art is today. The Victorian age was a revolutionary time for the world and for the scientific process, for example, it wasn’t until 1870 that surgeons were required to wash their hands to cut down on infectious germs being transmitted to patients.

This piece is a reflection on how the curiosity of scientific discovery can act as inspiration. This is a life-sized medical illustration rendered in three dimensions using my preferred medium, clay with wood, and metal elements, the title “FIG 1”, and the tell-tale t-pins, pinning the frog to the surface reinforce the medical reference. Many will likely find the visual vocabulary familiar having partaken in the inevitable frog dissection in science class at school. Whether the experience was fascinating or revolting it will likely be a shared memory triggered by this piece.

I like to play with beauty and revulsion at the same time. I have immortalized this memory in clay, giving it a statue-like quality, a reverence that doesn’t normally accompany this type of scientific endeavor, this is echoed by the frame forever preserving the subject under glass and ready for display. I play on the viewer’s curiosity to get closer to the subject matter and discover the absurd, in this case where the frog’s anatomy is replaced by a small human heart.

FIG 1, 2021, clay, T-pins, wood frame

Drinking Light, 2014, handblown glass, plasma neon

An Exquisite Balance

Tricia Wasney

Winnipeg MB

An Exquisite Balance, is the result of my participation in Dura Mater: Reflections on Neurofeminism, a collaboration between Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and the Neuroscience Network of Manitoba. In January 2020, five artists, selected by a jury, began a year-long collaboration with five neuroscientists to share research, thoughts, and wonder regarding brains, bodies, chemistry, perceptions, and their relationship to the construction of gender and power structures. Through the Dura Mater project I worked with Dr. Tabrez Siddiqui who studies synapses which is the way neurons transfer fundamental information between one another. Dr. Tabrez described normative brain activity as “an exquisite balance” between excitatory and inhibitory activity. “An exquisite balance” resonated with me as I learned more about neuroscience including the lack of representation of women in the field. I began to look into the work of historical women neuroscientists, many of whom were not adequately credited for their work or whose careers were curtailed by sexism and/or racism. I investigated “an exquisite balance” as it relates to gender and racial equality in neuroscience as well as to brain activity.

Wild Geranium Bowl

Crys Harse Calgary AB

How can I make an etched plate, yet be more environmentally friendly?

Craft involves creative problem-solving and learning from those who have come before. Working with the properties of the materials we use is learned through years of trial and error and has led to fine craft as we now know it, but often with harmful side effects, as with cadmium in gold solder and paints, lead in ceramic glazes, aniline dyes in fibre and wood.

Experiments in developing safer Etching:

1. Fish: StazOn stamping ink resist etched with ferric chloride

2. Frogs: Metallic frog stickers resist electo-etched using bisodium sulphate electrolyte

3. Patterned Horse: Traditional asphaltum resist, dried for 2 weeks, electro-etched using bisodium sulphate electrolyte

4. Initial C: PnP resist etched with ferric chloride

5. Bird in the Water: Future acrylic floor polish resist, 3 coats, electroetched using bisodium sulphate electrolyte

6. Metallic Horse Stickers: Metallic horse stickers, metallic stars, and page reinforcements as resists, etched with ferric chloride

7. Staedtler Lumocolor: Red 317WP4, black, blue, and green pen resists (blue works best) etched with ferric chloride

Hippocampus (for Dr. Brenda Miller b. 1918 and Dr. Suzanne Corkin, 1937-2016) 2021, vintage collar, thread

Glial Cells (for Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, 1926-2017) 2021, Vintage collar, thread Wild Geranium 2021, copper, gilders’ paste, recycled vintage, curtain ring, brass, escutcheon pins

Enticement

McKenzie Edmonton AB

Enticement explores falsities in perception and the relationship between the natural and artificial using CMYK screen printing, photography, and collage. I am drawn to the illusionistic effects of synthetic tackle materials that are often based on the fluorescent and vibrant hues found in the extensive breeding variations within fish. I explore the art form, history, and technical traditions of fishing and fly-tying by inventing colourful fusions of creatures and the bait that attracts and captures them.

My conceptual research has grown outside of the artistic community and taken me on a path to connect with experts such as ichthyologists, marine biologists, anglers, and fly-tiers. This direction has created a rich area of study in which I am continuously engaged as well as enabling me to see my work through a collaborative and scientific lens. My time spent alongside a cohort of artists during the online Ayatana Artist Residency Biophilia Program in 2020, allowed me to delve deeper into my research and opened new opportunities in my work such as incorporating entomology and ornithology. Over the two-week residency I learned firsthand from informative talks from contemporary artists working with mycology, taxidermy,

tropism, cormorants, seeds, spirulina, trail cameras, and much more. During the residency I was exposed to many different perspectives and considered ways to utilize trail cameras, microscopes, natural dyeing & ink rendering, papermaking, and sound within my art practice; all of which has spurred me to continue to find other connections with science communities.

This series allows me to expand my web of questioning into broader areas of ecology and contemplation. In particular, the artificial spaces and environments that host these intriguing creatures are important. They provide a research ground for me to explore and determine my own ethical stance within the culture of sport fishing and the aquarist’s role in fish keeping, without causing the typical destruction and captivity issues. In conversation with my personal inspiration and inquiries, my research in the areas of ichthyology, entomology, and ornithology further inform how I collect and transform my creations. It is my intention that this process of discovery allows viewers to consider their own connections to the small life that lives amongst us.

Amanda

Bittersweet Betta, 2021

screen print on mitsumata with paper manipulation

Siamese Fighting Fly: Flamboyancy, 2021 screen print on mitsumata with paper spinning and manipulation

Marbled Millionsh, 2021 screen print on mitsumata with suminagashi marbling on unryu tissue, Inkjeton Phototex

Cobra Coer Tailed Guppy, 2021 screen print on tama tissue with uorescent mactac

Exhibition view with work by Amanda McKenzie, Anna Heywood-Jones, and Teresa Johnston

Tinctorial Cartographies

Anna Heywood-Jones Vancouver BC

Tinctorial Cartographies emerged from the desire to undertake an in-depth exploration of dye plants growing in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia) and to create a regional lexicon of colour. The project is in one sense a study of the terroir of colour, yet it also strives to consider the complex meanings held within plant life, and our relationship to it, articulated through the processes of harvesting, extracting, and dyeing.

In the interest of capturing a seasonal range of plant-derived colour, the project took place over a calendar year. I began the research process by identifying candidate dye plants, and subsequently travelled across the region to locate and harvest them. Over time, the project grew to involve a more intuitive and serendipitous approach, wherein fieldwork would reveal significant plants within a given area and their dye-bearing potential would be discovered upon extraction in the pot. Over course of the year, I came to learn/see that land is a deep repository of knowledge, and that the presence and absence of plant species offers insight into the complex cultural, political, and ecological histories of Mi’kma’ki.

In a process that verges on the alchemical, each harvested plant was transmuted into a viable source of colour through hot water

extraction. In a way, each resulting dyed swatch merely stands in for its source plant—as the botanical body is transposed into a textile articulation it commits the plant to material memory. The swatches also map my journey through the province, marking the chemical particularities of plant, soil and season, they are cartographies of time and place.

Each swatch was handwoven with linen, cotton, tencel, silk, and wool, in both warp and weft. The five fibres are represented using three mordant variables (potassium aluminum sulphate, ferrous sulphate and no mordant). The fibres were mordanted prior to weaving, therefore the swatches come off the loom white in colour. When a single swatch is placed in a dye bath, 225 blocks of colour emerge with heat and time. The dyed swatches are complex chemical records as each fibre and mordant interacts with a dyestuff in a unique manner, thus creating a colour field of reactions and relations.

The work was created with support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Nova Scotia Museum (with botany consultation from curator Marian Munro).

Detail Tinctorial Cartographies, 2016, linen, cotton, silk, tencel, wool, naturally sourced plant derived dyes

Embroidered Reinterpretation of Scientific Drawings of Brain Microanatomy

Karen Wall Edmonton AB

In my embroidery works reflecting anatomy and others stylizing computer circuit boards, I am combining technological, organic and craft modes of information in order to reimagine both the microbiological in a time of viral panic and pandemic transformation of social, economic and political relations, and the material foundations of digital culture - electrical circuitry - through the “messy hand of craft”. This perspective in which a technique traditionally gendered feminine can render codes of masculine science in terms that are accessible, playful and stripped of their alienating authorities, reveals an aesthetic complexity that both challenges and reinforces the conditions of power from which they emerge.

Just as science codes meaning through regulated languages and imagery - stitching follows certain patterns and processes that allow new meanings to emerge from simple shapes, lines and motions. Both science and embroidery craft must conform to certain boundaries and constraints of materials and technologies, and yet can generate new combinations and relationships that can enhance ways of seeing.

These embroidered works reinterpret scientific drawings of brain microanatomy. They represent aspects of the brain and various anomalies and injuries incurred, modelled on and inspired by the drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), known as the father of modern neuroscience and a Nobel Laureate who left almost three thousand drawings visualizing the microanatomy of the brain.

Studies in the history of science and art have both demonstrated the importance of the search for new ways of seeing familiar objects and phenomena – an ongoing and iterative ‘redistribution of the sensible’ - whether literally through various devices such as the microscope or metaphorically by way of different knowledge paradigms and viewpoints.

Science and art histories are in part histories of information, how it is represented and an exploration of the rules and precepts governing its sensibilities.

Scar tissue in a cut nerve stump (a) 2020, cotton, silk

The labyrinth of the inner ear 2020, cotton, silk

Scar tissue in a cut nerve stump (b) 2020, cotton, silk

Injured axons at pyramidal neurons in the cerebral cortex 2020, cotton, silk

Calyces of Held in the nucleus of the trapezoid body 2020, cotton, silk

Electroformed Cage Work

Charles Lewton-Brain Calgary AB

Science was originally practiced by artists, and scientific understanding of material and process is vital to my work and teaching. The work utilizes accident and close observation as a tool to find new techniques, and my approach has reflections of the laws of physics, chemistry and materials, systems, and of nature.

The Cage work is electroformed on stainless steel welded wire structures, literally grown in a sulfuric acid and copper sulfate bath, like coral growing in the sea. My understanding of scientific basis of the system lets me guide and control what happens.

“[Electroforming is] Building Atom by Atomlike 3-D additive printing but perfect at the atomic scale on a surface. It is ‘ionic construction’ because we build by adding single atoms one at a time.”

- From A Short Look at How Charles Lewton-Brain Grows Jewelry

A Short Look at How Charles Lewton-Brain Grows Jewelry

Scan QR code or click here to watch the video

Knitted 1 interlaced copper wire, extended copper electroforming, 24k gold electroforming Bracelet Swoop, 2016, fusion welded stainless steel wire, copper electroforming, 24K gold

Still from the video A Short Look at How Charles Lewton-Brain Grows Jewellery

Objects for Empaths

ASMR for Empaths

Tanya Doody Lethbridge AB

Objects, gesture, and the body are concerns in my work. Objects for Empaths and ASMR for Empaths are comprised of ceramic objects and video that explore the emerging science of ASMR and the potential for objects, sound and touch to affect the brain to create a sense of calm.

With a global pandemic in active progress, touch takes on a different meaning, and, as a central concern in my work, needs to be engaged with in new ways. We are now— more than ever—experiencing a heightened awareness of the body. How we navigate space, hold distance between bodies, feel the absence of touch and miss the transmission of tactile knowledges is omnipresent. In thinking through reimagining audience engagement in the absence of touch I discovered ASMR.

Objects for Empaths was created as a gesture of care, and is intended as an offering to the most empathetic, absorbent, and porous among us, for whom stresses accumulate in the body and mind. It is meant as a nonverbal expression of empathy, and acknowledges the toll that constant vigilance can take on us.

This work was supported in part by

Scan QR code or click here to watch the video ASMR for Empaths

Objects for Empaths, 2021, ceramic Detail Objects for Empaths ASMR for Empaths, 2021, digital video

Curiosities: Pairing #2

Jane Kidd Salt Spring BC

I see these works as scientific artifice, engineered aberrations of the natural order; they disturb but also offer seductive possibilities.

Curiosities: Pairings #2 is part of a series of works that explore my interest in concepts related to technology and the transformation of the natural world. This work reflects my own curiosity, skepticism and disorientation in the face of a world transformed by new technologies. Recent advances now provide the means to disrupt evolutionary biology; altering genetic material to create genetically modified organisms, clones and hybrids. For a layperson such as myself, these developments are both intriguing and disturbing.

To create these works I have taken on the role of a pseudoscientific collector, akin to the seventeenth-century collectors who searched the “New World” for wonders to house in their Cabinets of Curiosities (Wunderkammer). I have created contemporary curiosities, carefully woven hybrid chimeras, which join two distinct entities, pairings that combine human, animal or plant images. I see these works as scientific artifice, engineered aberrations of the natural order; they disturb but also offer seductive possibilities.

The tapestries in this series are mounted on wooden shelves to present the tapestries as museum specimens suggesting relationships and/or contradictions between art and science, imagination and knowledge, decoration and display.

Jane Kidd, Curiosities: Pairing #2, 2013, woven tapestry, Photo by: John Cameron

The Cambrian Revival

MacKenzie Roth Calgary AB

Occurring nearly 541 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion is critical in piecing together prehistoric timelines and tracking evolutionary paths – its discovering marked the first major appearance of fossilized animal phyla. Spanning 13 – 25 million years, there are many ‘series’ or events within the Cambrian era, however, none are more famous than the middle Cambrian and the appearance of the Burgess Shale. Found across the Canadian Rockies in Alberta and British Columbia, the Burgess Shale preceded the one of the earliest known fossil beds, mostly containing soft-body imprints in shale. These creatures were not only the evolutionary ancestors of modern phyla, but they were also significantly more distinct in form than modern creatures. The study of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian Explosion formed how we now understand evolution and biological histories. As central as the evidence is, fossils left from the soft-bodied sea creatures are fragile and often hard to find or distinguish from the slate of the surrounding area. Though the area’s significance to our tourism is widely understood,

many are misinformed of the creatures fossilized in the area and the fragility and significance of their remains. This work seeks to impart a stronger appreciation of this Canadian breakthrough upon the viewer, allowing them to take further pride and fascination in the diversity and amazing feature of the Canadian landscape – all through the vessel of blown glass. The delicate nature of glass and its ghostly, frosted appearance speaks to a sense of trace – furthering the feeling of reviving the past. The work is a collection of blown glass Cambrian creatures, brought back to life for the viewer’s fascination and education.

The Cambrian Reviva l, 2018-2021, blown glass, coral, geode (quartz)

Trilobite 2020, hot sculpted glass Wiwaxia, 2019, hot sculpted glass

In Other Words: Meaning and Mood

Mireille Perron Calgary AB

In Other Words: Meaning and Mood are my recent Laboratory of Feminist Pataphysics (LFP)1 experiments with extruded fibre/paper clay and French knitting, where each material translates the other the best way it can. I invent a Feminist Pataphysical protocol for my material translations that uses unique equivalencies and similarities.

For example: both clay and textile are ‘extrusions’ made with customized tools. I take a similar amount of time to make the ceramics components as I take knitting the fibre components. Or I make the fibre clay with local clays or I get my wool from a local Mills (Carstairs Woolen Mills.) Or I walk back and forth in “loops” in my studio while doing the work and translate/retrace these accumulative pathways in both materials. The components are modular so the various translations can be of different sizes but they always keep the proportion of a page. I include material footnotes at the bottom of each mural. I also added 11 X 17” “posters” made of rug hooking (my Covid induced new skill.) Each ‘poster’, like a scientific close-up, is an excerpt of the effects of the spiralling murals. The ‘posters ‘also have ‘footnotes’, and one is a ‘bibliography.’ I understand these translations as feminist patahor; pataphors using newly-created metaphorical similarities as realities on which to base themselves.

1 Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), a precursor of the Surrealist Mouvement, invented and described the indiscipline of pataphysics as” The science of imaginary solutions.” The spiral is a recurrent model/process/motif in pataphysics. My LFP promotes material based science through fictive and gendered narratives. LFP embraces the spiral in all its potentiality.

Exhibition installation Detail In Other Words: Meaning and Mood (poster), 2021, rug hooking (wool)

In Other Words: Meaning and Mood (excerpt), 2021, extruded fibre clay, and French knitting wool

Recreation of Traditional Mi’kmaq Pottery

Nancy Oakley Eskasoni NS

As an artist, Nancy creates culturally significant vessels that imbue her spiritual and traditional knowledge and honour her role as a mother. She creates her pieces by using the wheel or hand building larger sculptural vessels and finds inspiration in nature and the creation of life. She incorporates traditional practices in her creations, such as stone polishing and smokefiring. These pieces are later embellished with traditional Mi’kmaq black ash basketry, intricate beadwork and/or the spiritual element of sweetgrass. She has also begun to recreate traditional pottery of the Mi’kmaq. Local clay and tempers are harvested and processed to handbuild cooking pot recreations and then traditionally fired in an above ground firing.

Ancestral pottery firing process, 2021

Cancel Bay Res Clay Small Cooking Vessel, 2019, pit fired pottery

Collaborations with Nancy Oakley

Cora Woolsey, PhD, RPA Fredericton NB

I am an archaeologist with a specialization in Indigenous pottery from the Maritime Provinces. I have looked at ceramic collections from all over the Maritimes and I did my PhD research on the largest site in the Maine–Maritimes Region, the Gaspereau Lake Reservoir Site Complex (complex just means many sites close together). My interest in ceramics is both artistic and technological and I see the two as intertwined and maybe even as the same thing. In the context of archaeological ceramics, “artistic” takes on a new meaning because what is considered beautiful is culturally specific and also is handed down from generation to generation. The same is true for “technology”: what is considered useful and wellmade depends on what the culture wants out of the pot and the knowledge to make the pot in just the right way is handed down through the generations.

As an archaeologist who specializes in Indigenous ceramics, I look to Nancy to help me decode what I am seeing in archaeological ceramics. Nancy has made reproductions of the artifacts I study. The processes she undergoes help me to understand what skills would have been needed to make the pottery, where people would have gone for the materials, and how many people would have been needed for the process. I can take Nancy’s experiences and apply them to the past to get a better understanding of why people made the choices they made.

Archaeologists have not always used these kinds of experimental techniques to understand their subject matter, and as a result, we have gotten it wrong a lot. I have been extremely fortunate to have Nancy to help me conduct better, more evidence-based archaeology.

I met Nancy when she was showing her pottery at a powwow in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I had been given her name by a Wyandot potter who recommended her as someone who was learning to reproduce traditional Mi’kmaw pottery. Nancy very kindly answered my questions about her experience digging up clay, what she tempered her clay with, what paddling was like compared with using a wheel, and what her firing regime was like. This was very important information for me because I was a PhD student in archaeology trying to understand what processes made the archaeological pottery look the way it did, and having someone who knew how to make pottery in that way helped me understand my collection much better.

Cora Woolsey

Pot diagram, Later Middle Woodland Pot Shards, Later Middle Woodland Pot

T issues

Adriane Vant Erve of Calgary, Alberta

January 29 - March 12, 2022

HOW I CAME TO MAKE THE TISSUES SERIES OF WORK

The Tissues series of work was created as my senior graduating project from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2019. With a background in Interior Design, one of my goals was to create an immersive experience for the viewer. I wanted to work in three dimensions with transparency, and stitching was the work I wanted to do repeatedly. The uncanny was in my thoughts, as well as fragility of life, imperfection, and exploring deeper meaning. I decided to use silk organza because of its special qualities.

Silk organza has a body to the fabric which keeps it full when hanging and it shimmers in light. As a natural fibre, it has life. As I began to stitch lines into it, I realized that this was an excellent way to add shape and texture. The hanging threads began to look very dramatic, reminding me of hair and veins on and beneath the surface of the transparent organza.

Attending the Fibre program at AUArts, as well as the sculpture program at the University of Sydney made me think a lot about breaking traditional rules for craft and sewing and using these techniques to make art. I had been around grandmothers who sewed, quilted, crocheted, and knitted and there were so many rules to follow! I think there was defiance coming out about these rules. I also learned about artists such as Ruth Asawa, Louise Nevelson, Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse. These artists worked with repeating form and line in a way that I admired, and Eva Hesse worked with soft and unconventional forms to break boundaries about what qualified as art. As I saw the forms of my pieces taking shape, the possibilities and the concept expanded. There was a lifelike presence to the silk organza pieces. My fantastic teachers including Mackenzie Kelly-Frere, Barbara Sutherland, and Laura Vickerson were all so supportive as I moved through this process.

I had been influenced by a project at the University of Sydney which focused on kinetics. As I hung the first iterations of these sculptures, I saw how air currents caused them to move as you walk by, and how it seemed they were interacting not only with the viewer, but with each other to become a kind of community of bodies. As the idea of a fragile, strange body developed, I dyed some organza with madder (a root used since ancient times to produce red dye). A small amount of madder produced a spectacular blood red colour on the organza. The silk naturally crinkled as it dried, and it became a heart, lungs, and bowels.

I decided to draw portraits of some of these sculptures with graphite on paper which was in keeping with my concept of bodily tissues. My wonderful teacher Kasia Koralewska at AUArts helped me learn how to photograph and prepare these drawings in Photoshop to create a pixelated image for silkscreening. I printed these images onto the silk in repeating patterns as it was the perfect way to showcase the drawings.

I am very proud of the way that I broke through traditional craft conventions, and I feel a real connection to the sculptures that is emotional. I hope that the viewer too will be reminded of our own

fragility and wonderfully complex body structures.

I am currently a member of Workshop Studios in Calgary which is a wonderful community to belong to. I find it so important to be in a supportive environment. On days when I might otherwise feel isolated, my studio cheers me up and encourages me. I am inspired by the work of the other artists and the buzz of the studio.

In the future, I would like to complete a Master of Fine Arts, but for now I am working on a new body of work specifically about anxiety and how it feels in the body. It is a privilege to be featured in this solo show at the Discovery Gallery!

To view the online exhibition and artist talk visit albertacraft.ab.ca/discovery-gallery

Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery - Edmonton

( re) FORM

‘My practice unfolds over thresholds both physical and imaginary. Unimportantly autobiographical, the core of my recent body of work is an attempt to understand and to make material my memories of land (place) and home (body). As an instinctual maker, my work is the language of my process, a spiritual necessity.’

(re)Form is an exhibition of works from Carissa Baktay a Canadian artist that splits her time between Alberta and Iceland. Baktay graduated with a Masters in Glass Art and Science from Vicartè Research Unit in Portugal, and a BFA from Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. Baktay works with mixed media, and process is a significant aspect of her finished pieces. The work for (re)Form is mixed media - glass, horsehair, and fibre; her unique voice coming through strongly in these truly one-of-a-kind objects.

‘Hair is inextricably intertwined with identity and I approach it from a personal female perspective. Many women have early memories related to hair and throughout the female lifecycle hair plays important roles in differing cultural and societal value systems. Through the process of sitting with these ideas in my hands, these sculptures come to life strand by strand through hours of grooming as a form of artistic intimacy. controlling my body as a powerful tool to create the glass vessels that contain and form the hair. These subtly shaped blown glass sheaths provide the invisible structures for forms that are not exact replicas but are memories of objects, intuitive translations.’

The objects she has made for (re)Form are loaded with innuendo. Through her labour and process of meticulously grooming each object, she creates a subtle, fetishized, ambience. In these sculptures implied sexuality mixes with a sort of domesticated taxonomy of glass, hair and fibre. Her treatment of the horsehair, constrained by the transparent, colourless, glass ‘vessels’ she has blown, places the hair under a pseudo scientific lens, slightly magnifying the strands that are compressed; conforming it to the shape dictated by the glass containing them. The objects are charged with a sense of feminine nostalgia and preparation, alluding to a ‘hidden narrative’. Baktay is examining identity from a female perspective, through her meditative process of intimate and loving grooming. She is using familiar materials in new and surprising ways to provide a ‘...playful space for contemplation’, and to challenge us to ‘...a new poetic material understanding.’

To view the online exhibition and artist talk visit albertacraft.ab.ca/discovery-gallery

This page Curly-Q 2021, blown glass, hand polish, horse hair

Opposite page: (top row): Between, Both II, 2021, cotton, horse hair Tip 2021, blown glass, horse hair, hibiscus (bottom row) Cruel(la) 2021, blown glass, horse hair Persist, 2018, horse hair, copper

Photos by: Marinó Flóvent

Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery - Edmonton March 19 - April 30, 2022

Carissa Baktay of Calgary, Alberta / Reykjavik, Iceland

miyotamon nananis - it is a good road in all directions

The journey began from the stories of my mother, and then the vistas required multiple layers of research. I connected to friend Ruth McConnell, former assistant curator of ethnology with the Royal Alberta Museum, and to her knowledge of the ethnology & genealogy of Dene papers. This aided me in my navigation of our family recorded history; of where my family lived, where they traveled and/or crossed the landscape to harvest for food sources, their economy and their scrip and/or land squatting. Some holes were resolved and for the most part the recorded history matched the family stories. In all discoveries, the knowledge my mother shared in her stories was more reliable.

I surfed through the Alberta Archives, Hudson Bay Archives, and City of Edmonton Archives. The multiple research aids examined included arial photographs and maps showing the “trade routes” referred to as “old Indian trails”. These routes and family harvesting sites are highlighted in red lines throughout the landscape panels. Comparing these multiple resources became a wholistic way of looking at the land and when possible, I took another perspective from the land by foot, and in the air by helicopter. The goal was to envision the landscapes from eagle-eye perspectives and to recreate the landscapes through time. Through these idyllic drawings, I recognized the disappearing lakes, the ghosts of rivers, creeks, and ponds sewn in white fabrics and ribbons. I notice the disappearing shorelines of Cooking Lake and many others - that the shorelines are further out then I remember as a child, in ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᕀ, Amiskwaciy – Beaver Hills could this be a result of climate change and or colonization? I want to know, where did all the water go…and what is happening to the land, animals, and plant life?

I wanted to work with respected, awarded, published poet, storyteller and Metis elder Marylin Dumont. In each piece I have stitched her words into lakes rivers and ponds. It is a great honour collaborating with Marylin, stitching her words into these bodies of water. As we talked about each other’s work I resolved that our practices and origin-messages of how we see our ancestral landscapes are simultaneously goals of sharing our writing and art forms. I felt this added another layer and dynamic for the viewer to understand the work.

With all my elders we spoke about our connection to Nindis –my belly button in Ojibway / ᒥᑎᓯᕀ mitisiy (one of my family’s lost languages) and this expressed how important it was to work with women. When communicating my art practice, through smudge, protocols, and cultural sharing I feel, out of respect, we acknowledge how we are all connected. As I considered how we are connected to our maternal home fires, and the yellow ochre in our soil, I used this yellow colour, similar to soil that also mirrors the amber embers in the fire, in the elk suede hide that surrounds and supports each work.

I wish to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts - Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples, Short-Term Projects, and The Edmonton Arts Council - Equity & Access in the Arts - Stream 3Major Artist-Driven Projects.

To view the online exhibition and artist talk visit albertacraft.ab.ca/discovery-gallery

Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery - Edmonton

May 7 - June 21, 2022

Heather Shillinglaw of Edmonton, Alberta

sâkâhikan, 2022, Cooking Lake, recycled fabrics, hand sewn beadwork, stabilizers, thread painting, elk hides, acrylic paints, yarns (middle row): Midaaso-ishi-nisway Miskwaadesi Giizis, 2022, 13 turtle moons, recycled fabrics, hand sewn beadwork, recycled poly fill, stabilizers, thread painting, elk hides, yarns detail Midaaso-ishi-nisway Miskwaadesi Giizis, 13 turtle moons (bottom row): detail amiskwaciy-wâ skahikan, beaver hills house

Opposite page : amiskwaciy-wâ skahikan beaver hills house, 2022, Edmonton River Valley recycled fabrics, hand sewn beadwork, stabilizers, thread painting, acrylic paints, yarns

M aking of a Monument

‘It is the dream of nearly every sculptor I know to create a bronze public sculpture: an artwork immortalized for generations upon generations. A fiercely competitive process, no amount of talent, perseverance or hard work can guarantee the privilege of such an opportunity.’

Ritchie Velthuis is a visual artist whose primary focus has been sculpture in various mediums including ice and snow, clay, cement, found/recycled material and most recently bronze. His dedication to refining his craft was rewarded when he was granted the commission for Edmonton’s SCTV Monument, a public artwork in bronze depicting iconic TV characters, Bob and Doug MacKenzie located on the corner of 103 street and 103 Avenue in Edmonton’s Ice District.

SCTV’s first season was filmed in Toronto, but the show was at risk of being cancelled before it could gain any sort of momentum. It was Dr. Charles Allard that laid the groundwork for the show to move Edmonton and to blossom as a staple on both CBC and NBC. It was from Edmonton that characters such as the McKenzie Brothers, Johnny LaRue, Guy Caballero and Edith Prickley would emerge as pop-culture staples.

The installation of SCTV Monument in the Ice District was slated for March 2020 and an unveiling celebration was planned on the afternoon of March 27, 2020, with Bo and Doug actors Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas in attendance. Then the coronavirus hit and

everything changed. The unveiling was cancelled but the sculpture was installed anyway. SCTV Monument became a local sensation. Images on social media popped up everywhere and pictures of people sitting with Bob and Doug quickly replaced fan’s Facebook covers or profile shots. A picture of Bob & Doug wearing surgical masks with the caption “#StayHome It Could Save Lives” flooded the internet.

In February 2021 the SCTV ceramic works were exhibited at Harcourt House’s Art Incubator Gallery, but because galleries were mandated to be closed to the public during Covid very few people were able to see the exhibition. With Covid restrictions lifted at last, the Alberta Craft Council was able to present, Making of a Monument, our exhibition of Ritchie Velthuis’ SCTV characters, to celebrate the creation of SCTV Monument in Edmonton’s Ice District and Ritchie Velthuis’ contribution to our community as an artist.

Velthuis’ Discovery Gallery exhibition was a series of photographs, text and sculpture, chronicling the creation process of the public artwork. Including the genesis of the project, creation of the original, stages at the foundry, the patina process, revisions, installation and the public reaction. Velthuis’ epic journey with this artwork, spanning 10 years, was explored and celebrated.

To view the online exhibition and artist talk visit albertacraft.ab.ca/discovery-gallery

Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery - Edmonton June 25 - September 3, 2022

Ritchie Velthuis of Gibbons, Alberta

This page (clockwise): Bobby Bittman, 2013, fired clay painted with acrylic

Lola Heatherton, 2013, fired clay painted with acrylic

Johnny LaRue, 2013, fired clay painted with acrylic

Edith Prickley, 2013, fired clay painted with acrylic

Opposite page: Ritchie Velthuis with the SCTV Monument, 2020, photo by: Marc Chalifoux photo

Coveted Craft

Coveted Craft is our in-shop feature where we showcase a selection of objects that we hope will inspire you to bring craft into your daily life. We carry the work of over 175 artists in our downtown Edmonton Gallery Shop and 80 artists in our Calgary Gallery Shop at cSPACE.

The Alberta Craft Council continues to present Fine Craft to visitors in a wide array of styles, techniques, and unique expressions of creativity.

Bring Alberta Craft home. Visit us online or in person. 10186-106 Street, Edmonton | 1721-29 Avenue SW, Calgary www.albertacraft.ab.ca/galleryshop

1 Argentium silver necklace with hessonite garnet, 24 karat gold, black patina Ron Maunder, St. Albert

2 Rabbit Sitting, raku Lisa Wilkinson, Yellowhead County

3 Blown glass oil lamp Jie Yang & Paul van den Bijgaart, Edmonton

4 Red and blue floral purse, felted wool Nataliia Iashnikova, St. Albert

5 Artistic Beastliness, mini tote with handstitched details, upcycled wool and leather Matt Gould, Red Deer

6 My Tree, Brazilian soapstone Loretta Kyle, Bonnyville

7 Korean Maple Leaf Domed Box, walnut, marquetry Jean-Claude and Talar Prefontaine, Calgary

8 Speedster, two-tone glass vessel Keith Walker, Edmonton

9 Shortie Puff, naturally dyed handwoven cotton and wool earrings Kelly Ruth, Edmonton

10 Gravy boat, soda fired stoneware Lael Chmelyk, Calgary

11 Metal partridge dish, new and recycled copper, brass Crys Harse, Calgary

12 Bear doll, linen and cotton Stefanie Staples, Cochrane

Coveted Craft Corporate Orders

Whether your company is starting a recognition program, or is looking for a one-time gift, we encourage you to consider shopping at the Alberta Craft Council. Every purchase you make has a meaningful impact, and the support of corporations and individuals means that our organization can continue promoting, developing, and advocating for fine craft in Alberta.

WHY HAVE A CORPORATE AWARDS PROGRAM WITH THE ALBERTA CRAFT COUNCIL?

When you collaborate with our expert staff, they will create a gift guide full of one-of-a-kind items for you to choose from. With each selection you are not only finding unique and thoughtful gifts, but you are supporting all levels of artists producing craft across the province.

You only need to worry about which beautiful pieces you wish to select, as we work directly with artists to fulfill orders from as low as ten items to hundreds of items at a time. Each piece is thoughtfully gift-wrapped and includes a biography with more information on the artist. To keep your order organized, each box is labelled with an image of the work. Every detail from gift selection to packaging is considered.

Award and Recognition programs are a way to thank employees for their work and to take the time to celebrate important career milestones alongside them. These programs encourage a positive workplace culture as employees are acknowledged and rewarded for their dedication. And when you give the gift of handmade craft from the Alberta Craft Council, you show thoughtfulness by choosing something made right here in Alberta. Moreover, you are connecting individuals with unique pieces that remind them of their time and achievements with the company.

While these programs are increasingly popular, companies may not have the means to source, order, and package unique and thoughtful gifts. Our expert staff work to streamline the process, and make selecting the perfect gift effortless.

The Alberta Craft Council has been a great find for the corporate gifts that we require. The art pieces are of the highest quality and beautifully designed. They are pleasant to work with and prompt in delivering the art pieces.

- Valerie Gaul, Executive Assistant, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta

OUR GIFT PROGRAM IN ACTION

Within the last year, The Alberta Craft Council has worked with Alberta Health Services on one such program. Their Long Service Awards program is part of an effort to positively impact the wellbeing of staff through appreciation and gratitude. Their on-going purchases of gifts for this program has been a support during a difficult time for artists and our organization. Since October 2021, Alberta Health Services has purchased over $40,000 in gifts, with over $25,000 going directly to Alberta artists. To date, over twenty artists have contributed to the orders, and this number continues to grow.

Did you know that the Alberta Craft Council Gallery Shop represents over 175 fine craft artists, making it easy to find the right gift for every budget and occasion. Moreover you can feel good knowing that sixty percent of your purchase goes directly to the artist, and the remaining forty percent is used to support the Alberta Craft Council in our programming, advocacy, and sector development.

Left to Right: Platter, maple with hand carved details Mason Eyben, Kitscoty Clouds and Bales, pressed ceramic tile Voyager Art & Tile, Dawn Detarando & Brian McArthur, Red Deer

Northern Light Waves landscape, kiln formed glass Lisa Head Harbidge, Rocky Mountain House

Magpie Tankard, wheel thrown, sgraffito design on porcelain stoneware Teresa Wyss, Calgary

Glassware, cane work rollup, blown glass Barry Fairbairn, Calgary

Craft Collaborations Fundraiser and Feature Exhibition

November 9 - December 9, 2022

The Alberta Craft Council is excited to present the third annual Craft Collaborations, an online auction fundraiser and in person Feature exhibition in celebration of the province’s enormous creative talent. Craft Collaborations brings together artists from across the province and across disciplines to create one-of-a-kind work. Participating artists will be paid 50% of the retail value for works sold. This fundraiser is in support of creating more paid opportunities and programming for fine craft artists across the province.

The auction will open at 11 am MT, November 9 and will close 3pm MT, December 9.

2022 PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Arlene Westen & Deanne Underwood, Crys Harse & Linda Chow, Elise Findlay & Dana Roman, Gillian Mitchell & Claire Becq, Jennifer Illanes & Cindy Giesbrecht, Karen Cantine & David Cantine, Laurie Bisset & Lisa Kaye-Stanisky, Leia Guo & Mackenzie Roth, Leah Kudel & Emily Nash, Luke Weiser & Milt Fischbein, Morgan Possberg & Noble Seggie, Natalie Gerber & Bill Morton, Puck Janes & Becky Best-Bertwistle, Talar Prefontaine & Jean-Claude Prefontaine, Tara Owen & Karen Kryzan, Stephanie Elderfield & Sara Young, William Miles & Brandon Tyson

Top to bottom (L-R): Karen Cantine & David Cantine Sterling silver brooches with stir sticks, from left to right: dark and light, with lapis lazuli, scattered Natalie Gerber & Bill Morton, Peoniez/Peony, linen Leah Kudel & Emily Nash, blown blass and crochet

Culture in the Making Podcast

Conversations About Contemporary Alberta Craft

Episode 6 of Culture in the Making with Dawn Detarando and Brian McArthur

Dawn Detarando and Brian McArthur operate Voyager Art & Tile, a professional studio located in Red Deer, Alberta. Voyager Art & Tile produces public art and a Canadian-inspired line of decorative fine craft tiles, using clay made in Alberta. Both Dawn and Brian hold Master of Arts degrees from Ohio State University, and they maintain their own studio practices. Dawn’s and Brian’s work can be found at the Alberta Craft Council galleries in Edmonton and Calgary.

Episode 7 of Culture in the Making with Hayden MacRae

Hayden’s formal education in glassblowing started at age 13 when he began attending workshops and lessons at Firebrand Glass Studio in Black Diamond under the leadership of Julia Reimer and Tyler Rock. For the past few years, he has been studying under Barry Fairbairn at Double-Struggle Glass Studio in Calgary. He continues to learn the discipline and craftsmanship of glass, creating pieces for purpose, and for beauty. Hayden now works out of Fascapple Glass, a studio he co-founded and opened in 2020. Fascapple is run as a public glassblowing studio and is an important platform for professional and hobbyist glass artists and the craft ecosystem in Alberta.

Episode 8 of Culture in the Making with Kenton Jeske

Kenton Jeske is a woodworker, designer, and craftsman of original handcrafted furniture. He builds to commission from his home studio shop, and his work can be found in the homes of private clients, places of worship, restaurants, retail spaces and galleries. A furniture maker for over a decade Kenton has developed a vernacular to his work that speaks to the integrity of materials, craftsmanship and finish that has reached clients like Louis Vuitton. In 2021 Kenton was nominated for the Alberta Craft Award for Excellence.

Upcoming Exhibitions & Events

More in-depth coverage of these upcoming exhibitions will be featured in the next issue of Alberta Craft Magazine. For up-to-date information on current exhibitions visit albertacraft.ab.ca or sign up for What’s In our free customer E-Newsletter.

ALBERTA CRAFT GALLERY EDMONTON 10186-106 Street NW, Edmonton AB

SELF-PROCESSION

Matthew O’Reilly

September 10 - October 22, 2022

Working between ceramics and sculpture, Matthew O’Reilly uses the sculpted figure as a launching pad for conversation about the human condition.

WILDLY SENSITIVE Annette ten Cate

October 29 - December 17, 2022

Featuring clay sculptures that reflect ten Cate’s love for and deep connection to the wildlife of this province, some of which are provincially designated as “at risk”.

CRAFT COLLABORATIONS

November 9 - December 9, 2022

The Alberta Craft Council is excited to present the third annual Craft Collaborations, an online auction fundraiser and in person Feature exhibition in celebration of the province’s enormous creative talent.

ALBERTA CRAFT GALLERY CALGARY 1721 - 29 Avenue SW, Suite 280 Calgary AB

ALBIRDA - PUT A BIRD ON IT

January 21 - April 29, 2023 - Calgary

A fantastic spectacle of avian delights, Albirda – Put a Bird On It is a celebration of the fascinating creatures of flight that live in and migrate through our province each year.

Celebrating our province’s winged wildlife through fine craft objects, Albirda – Put a Bird On It, features work from over 60 Alberta craft artists depicting a broad diversity of bird species, materials, and artistic approaches.

FEATURE GALLERY

DISCOVERY GALLERY

Matthew O’Reilly, Head Studies #1 2022, ceramic

Annette ten Cate, Portrait Bust - Woodland Caribou, 2022, ceramic

Natalie Gerber & Bill Morton, Peoniez/Peony linen

Hartley-Illanes, Jennifer Burger Bird, 2016-2022, embroidery thread, polyester satin, interfacing

Craft Tours

Craft curious? Join us for Culture in the Making experiential Craft Tours. Connect with your community of craft artists and supporters on curated boutique tours to artists’ studios, and behind the scenes of museum collections, cultural sites, galleries and more.

Many of our tours include hands on workshops from world renowned Craft artists from across Alberta. Created for new audiences, these workshops give participants a chance to learn more about the artists, their Craft mediums, and inspiration. Bring your curiosity and connect to your creativity as we build community and meaningful experiences centered around Craft. Did you know that Alberta Craft Council Membership has its benefits for Craft Tours as well? Be the first to know and receive a discount of up to 50%!

Recent Craft Tours:

Recreating Nature with Paper Clay with Sarah Ritchie, Calgary

Shrink Film Jewelry with Kari Woo, Calgary

Needle Felted a Bird with Holly Boone, Edmonton

Stories from Banff: Past and Present

Edmonton Bird Walk with Erin and Vicki of Wild Birds Unlimited

Red Deer Museum, Voyager Art & Tile Studio & Honey Farm Tour

Beaded Daisy Chain workshop, Calgary

Leaving an Impression, Cyanotype workshop with Mireille Perron, Calgary

Make Your Own Beeswax Food Wraps with Kristi Woo, Calgary

Once-in-a-Lifetime Kind of Day: Museum of Fear & Wonder & Bergen Sculpture Garden

Kiyooka Ohe Arts Centre Tour & Wild Weaving Workshop with Patricia Lortie, Calgary

Make a Turtle Pin with Heather Shillinglaw, Edmonton

Needle Felting with Jill Nuckles, Calgary

Money Zoo: Fantastic Beasts in the History of Money Tour and Workshop, Nickles Galleries, Calgary

Edmonton Bird Walk with Erin and Vicki of Wild Birds Unlimited

Inspiration from Bird Watching, Calgary

Curatorial Talk of Uninvited at the Edison, Calgary

Edmonton Design Week - Furniture Studios tour with Kenton Jeske, and Ralph Reichenbach

Birding in Albirda with Erin Dykstra of Wild Birds Unlimited, Edmonton

Upcoming Craft Tours:

Painting on Silk with Karin Thorsteinsson, Calgary

Cookie Cutters with Annette ten Cate, Edmonton

Edmonton Clay Studios Tour and Annette ten Cate artist talk

Indigenous Peoples Experience at Fort Edmonton Park with MJ Belcourt Moses and Anna Cousins

Create a Temari Ball with Oxana Lyashenko, Calgary

Dance with Fire! A Blown Glass Ornament with Hayden MacRae & Team, Calgary

Holiday Glass ornaments with Leah Kudel of Suspended Studio, Edmonton

Prairie Interlace: Close-up with Curator and Conservator, Calgary

Screen Printing Christmas Stockings with Natalie Gerber, Calgary

Metis Crossing tour and workshop

Around Alberta

Noteworthy craft exhibitions, events, and more

Gailan Ngan: From The Studio Floor

Esker Foundation, Calgary July 23 - December 18, 2022

The work of Gailan Ngan makes fated connections, not in any linear way, but poetically, by crafting associations between herself, the objects she collects, and the material she uses. This exhibition features hand-built sculptures that, while simply expressed, broadly explore shape, surface treatment, and colour. To further complicate and enrich finished work, industry byproducts, organic and processed objects, and studio experiments are included, each contributing to an extended narrative of material that is influenced by the historically resourcerich West Coast where Ngan lives and works. Installations operate as momentary end points or in situ conversations around a constellation of convergent and intersecting experiences that entwine her history to larger ecological events or industrial narratives.

www.eskerfoundation.com

Converse Subversives

Okotoks Art Gallery (OAG), Okotoks September 17- November 4, 2022

Converse Subversives is Shona Rae’s latest series of narrative/figurative sculptures that engages traditional myths, fairy tales, folklore, ancient artifacts and personal history to explore how societies in the past through to the present dealt with social inequalities, gender identification, agism, rape, plague and political upheavals. In times of change, stories can be a comfort to cling to or a tool to probe with.

Rae’s recent work strives to shift perspectives, juxtapose the known and the unknown, the precious and the mundane to probe the human psyche for memories, dreams and personal tales. She is seeking synergy that blurs the boundaries between jewellery and sculpture, metal and textiles, art and fine craft.

Converse, verb: engage in conversation. Converse, adjective: having characteristics which are the reverse or the opposite of something else. Subversive, verb: undermine the power and authority of (an established system or institution).

AUArts Students’ Association Fall Show + Sale

Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary November 25 – 27, 2022

Handmade local art in Calgary, proudly made by AUArts students.

AUArts Students’ Association Show + Sale returns to campus for the first in-person event in three years, on November 25 – 27, 2022.

Friday, November 25 is the ‘First Night Fundraiser’, tickets will be available closer to the date on Eventbrite and all proceeds from ticket sales go towards student scholarships. Saturday, November 26 and Sunday, November 27 are the weekend market, with a nominal donation on the door. All sales directly support the student artists and the Students’ Association.

www.showandsale.ca

Gailan Ngan, From the Studio Floor, 2022, Esker Foundation, Photo John Dean

AUArts Students’ Association Show + Sale

Shona Rae, Joe’s Fear (detail), 2021, steer skull, stag antlers, copper screen, wool, carved, formed and needle felted

The New Nature

Lethbridge Legacy Park Mosaic New public art

Created in 2022 by Ontario based artist Susan Day and commissioned by the City of Lethbridge Public Art Committee, ‘The New Nature’ is a ceramic mural composed of thousands of handmade tiles, seeking to connect park users more closely to their natural environment.

The narrative artwork explores our changing relationship with nature and challenges our perceived separation from the rest of the natural world. Walking past the mural, reflections in the tiny mirror fragments read as light coming through the trees in a forest. A fictional world reveals itself, where birds and people look each other in the eye, trees start to look industrial. The mural shifts with the changing light and seasons, and the artist hopes visitors can have a different experience with the work on each subsequent visit.

The City of Lethbridge commissioned the public art project to create a compelling and engaging entrance to the new Legacy Regional Park which spans 73 acres in north Lethbridge.

The mural project also involved a mentorship which saw emerging artist and educator Michelle Sylvestre working alongside Susan in both her studio and during the installation.

Museum of Aboriginal

Peoples’ Art and Artifacts

Portage College, Lac La Biche Year round

Portage College Museum of Aboriginal Peoples’ Art and Artifacts (MOAPAA) began in 1978 as a teaching collection for the college’s Native Arts and Culture programs.

The MOAPAA collections showcase foundational artists across different genres and tell the stories of the beginnings of various Indigenous art forms from coast to coast to coast. Visitors to the museum can enjoy a self-guided tour, and guided group tours can also be accommodated with prior arrangements. The exhibits provide an in-depth look at North American Indigenous Art from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit cultures and house the only permanent collection in the world of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc.

The museum’s collection contains over 2,000 Indigenous artworks. MOAPAA is housed at the Portage College Corporate Centre, which is situated in the beautiful county of Lac La Biche, Alberta

www.portagecollege.ca/Museum

Science Pick

Wayfinder

Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller Year round

This sculpture is composed of blown glass elements that demonstrate movement through their form and gestures. The purpose of this sculpture is to help move visitors through a space to connect them from one exhibit to another.

This piece is inspired by the Paleozoic period, it is marked by the movement of animals from the sea to land and air. Julia Reimer and Tyler Rock of Firebrand Glass Studio worked with scientists at the Royal Tyrell Museum to discover some of the unique characteristics and the creatures present during this time period and worked to include these individual elements to each component piece.

www.tyrrellmuseum.com

Artist Unknown, Baby moccasins, commercial deer hide, size 10 seed beads

Wayfinder, Julia Reimer and Tyler Rock of Firebrand Glass Studio

Susan Day, The New Nature ceramic mural

Photo Angeline Simon

Claiming Space: Big Prairie Textiles at Nickle Galleries

September 9 – December 17, 2022

Working at a university museum my time is divided between teaching, research, service and juggling many different priorities. The work is dynamic, exciting, frantic and frustrating. There are always projects on the horizon—a new acquisition, an exciting new exhibition, meetings with artists and students, and research questions to probe— but there is also often onerous administrative work. My time is spent more at the office computer than in the collection storage room. Consequently, having the time, space and energy to focus on one (mega) project—one that is close to my heart—has been precious indeed.

Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960–2000, co-curated by Timothy Long, Head Curator, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Julia Krueger, Independent curator and myself, recently launched at Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary. It features 60 works by 48 settler, immigrant, and Indigenous artists who lived, worked, or visited the Prairies. Many of the artists are well known—in fact internationally renowned—others’ reputations might have been more regional but their works are no less ambitious. Our research suggested several unifying themes: beyond the warp and weft, the elemental landscape, body politic, and soft power. Each of the works selected for inclusion speak to one or more of these broad themes. Assembled at Nickle Galleries, they demonstrate how artists working with textiles, both on and off the loom, were exploring new ideas, challenging assumptions and claiming space.

The exhibition alludes to the connectivity of textiles with works created at kitchen tables as well as those requiring extensive planning and studio assistants. They are woven by individuals as well as groups of weavers, by generations of teachers and students, and by sisters and daughters and cousins. Prairie Interlace features works produced by weavers associated with guilds and clubs as well as those who studied more formally through colleges and universities. It traces connections between some of the most exciting exhibitions

and developments in Fibre Arts in the second half of the twentieth century (Lausanne International Tapestry Biennials, 1962–1995; the MOMA’s Wallhangings, 1969; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago’s Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1982–83), and between weavers from Lethbridge to Prince Albert to Winnipeg and especially, The Banff School of the Fine Arts. The exhibition highlights how local artists actively tested and adapted, shared and participated in these developments.

One of the goals of Prairie Interlace has been to foster further inquiry into the very rich history of craft on the Prairies. The exhibition is inherently incomplete—hampered by Covid and issues of access— we were also hampered by the scarcity of public collections and archives, by inaccurate or incomplete documentation, by the fragility of textiles not to mention changing institutional priorities, tastes and fashion. To this end we have created a beautiful and informative website—www.prairieinterlace.ca—that documents the exhibition and each of the artists included. There are videotaped interviews of several of the artists with more planned for the coming fall and winter. A major publication will launch in Fall 2023 with essays by well-known craft scholars. I hope to find new ways to share our research, to develop deeper questions and foster new inquiry.

Recently I toured a large group of high school students through the exhibition who had no idea, that their mothers, grandmothers and even great-grandmothers (or fathers) were so modern, so revolutionary. This is a past they didn’t know but, for a moment, became relatable and awe inspiring.

Michele Hardy Curator, Nickle Galleries University of Calgary

This Page, top to bottom:

L-R:

Amy Loewan,

Pirkko Karvonen, Rapeseed Fields 1974,

Whynona Yates, Hanging, 1974, Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Photo by: Dave Brown, LCR PhotoServices.

Opposite Page:

Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000 (installation view), Nickle Galleries. F. Douglas Motter, This Bright Land 1976, City of Calgary Public Art Collection, Gift of the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation, 1983 990072 A-F, Photo by: Dave Brown, LCR PhotoServices

Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000 is a collaboration between Nickle Galleries and the MacKenzie Art Gallery of Regina.

This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible en partie grâce au gouvernement du Canada.

Please visit: https://www.prairieinterlace.ca/ For Nickle Galleries event information and hours: https://nickle.ucalgary.ca/

Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Anne-Marie 1976, Collection of Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Katharine Dickerson, West Coast Tree Stump, 1972, Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank / Collection de la Banque d’art du Conseil des arts du Canada; Ilse Anysas-Šalkauskas, Rising from the Ashes 1988, Collection of the Artist. Photo by: Dave Brown, LCR PhotoServices

A Peace Project, 2000, Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Photo by: Dave Brown, LCR PhotoServices

Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Photo by: Dave Brown, LCR PhotoServices

Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000 (installation views), Nickle Galleries. Photo by: Dave Brown, LCR PhotoServices