Ceramic flowering at Arts Underground
For the month of April, a group show of Yukon ceramics embellishes both galleries at Arts Underground. For the past few years, Teagan Beemer, curator of Arts Underground, has done an excellent job of selecting themes for group shows, with enough specificity to hold the show together and enough freedom to welcome a wide range of participation.
Members & Friends of the Arts Underground Ceramics Studio: Embellishment exhibition is no exception. The exhibition includes works made in the facility’s busy community ceramics studio, as well as flowerings of the art from other circumstances. Beemer groups the works in a way that brings together diverse methods in a way that strikes a balance between having the kind of company that brings out the characteristics of each piece, and giving the overall show the space to breathe.
While many of the artists exhibit a series of works, I will mention particular ones. Do go to the gallery to see the rest!
Remie Cherepak’s light, well-thrown mugs feature carved drawings. Claude the Eagle charms.
Roma Dobrolowsky exhibits a platter whose entire surface is filled with a daisy pattern, similarly recessed. I understand from speaking with the staff that she created this by rolling the clay over something with this pattern. I found that the way the glaze worked out, the blue in some of the etched lines seemed to glow.
Chris Scherbarth also seems to have pressed something with a paisley pattern down a centre runner in A tray for tidbits. This adds elegance to the resulting long, thin rectangular plate, with fine dark lines in the paisley depressions, under a thin milky glaze with pale turquoise on each side.
Ann-Patrice Cross has carved grooves into her Moon vase, a deliberately asymmetrical vessel. Dark lines of raised clay between the grooves trace a pattern in the pale blue glaze.
Ann Chapman hangs two pieces on the wall that combine ceramic and mirror. Discs of mirror peek through circular cutouts in the purple Tiny Bubbles.
Marie Hammje pushes our sense of what a vase can be. Vase II is a round form with a circle attached to the side and black brush strokes under a clear glaze, with one red dot. She takes a more-representational approach in Cicily where fully three-dimensional, yellow-lemon forms push out from the walls of the vase.
Lisa Moore embellishes her Nature ornaments—a squirrel, mushroom, loon and magpie—with metallic lustre eyes or dots.
Nicola Pritchet’s Yukon Forest in Winter plays with a horizon of glazing technique. A blue glaze inside and in the sky falls just over the textured edge of the forest, with remarkable control.
Sandra Grace Storey brings us three ceramic bears. Two of them actively paint red dots onto birds, while the third just enjoys them, one in each hand, one perched on each of its hind and forelegs.
Claire Strauss adorns her Quiet Mornings Guru mug with leaves and raspberries.
Donald Watt’s White T-Shirt seems to have been made of four slabs draped over someone’s shoulders, down past their hips. Watt has drawn a linear pattern using blue and black underglaze pencil on the resulting body-evoking garment. It faces into the wall.
Cheri Wilson’s abstracted doll-like figures use ceramic and oxides to a strong tactile effect. Though I’m just looking at them, I experience what it might be like to touch them.
Tammy Wood contributes a series of mugs and bowls. Her cheery watermelon cup includes three dots—pale pink, dark pink, and green.
Kelly Wroot shares some of his signature “chattered” stoneware, the texture of which is created holding a tool to the piece on the wheel, at a very specific level of dryness. His mug Morning Chat uses this technique to fine effect.
Rachel Westfall pours out a series of “tattooed” teapots. She carves into her drawings on the clay before it is fired. I was particularly taken with the whimsy of the brown birds painted on her Tattooed Windy Teapot.
Debi Wickham seems to take a round, thrown shape in a dark-red clay and pulls the edges upwards into organic, irregular shapes in making her Abyss Bowl. Her turquoise glaze swirls downwards, leaving a thin dark line along the bowl’s upper lip.Embellishment continues until Saturday, April 25. Arts Underground is open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
