Contemporary Ceramics Centre
Flow Gallery
Contemporary Applied Arts
This time, just from looking for ceramic events while I was there, I discovered a new marvel. This is Bridget Macklin's work. Check out bridgetmacklin.wordpress.com.
It's wonderful and improbable. She 's engaged with clay as earth, and earth as whatever mixes with soil. She thinks of it as a focus on geology, but it seems to me more about the mix of things in the earth's surface. To fine porcelain clay, she adds elements she picks up, in places meaningful to her. It's not supposed to be possible to mix ingredients with very different amounts and rates of expansion and contraction under the heat of firing, even under the stress of drying a pot. The always-predicted results are cracked, sometimes exploded pots. She agrees, and some of hers do crack, BUT! Here they are.
She's got crumbled colored earths mixed in, but also big chunks of rocks, bricks maybe, whatever she finds. Not possible, but successful. That's a marvel in itself.
And beautiful and sensitive. Sometimes she adds decal images, from photos she takes in the places where she finds her additives.
Pots very much in and from a place. I love it.
I met her and her work in this exhibit, and the talk with the artists.
All three (Bridget Macklin, Desa Philippi, Camilla Webb Carter) are real artists, with well-made, thoughtful work that expresses something they want to say and comes intuitively from their experience and choice. But only one really grabs me, that strange thing about taste. The others make pieces that are attractive, and serious; Bridget Macklin's pieces are compelling for me.
What is in the earth around us anyway? I can't resist adding this picture, the ground on Delos, a Greek island that went, in the unpleasant reality of long history, from sacred site to big port city to declining village to pirate' hideout to national park and sort of sacred archeological treasure. Look! The tan colored bits are broken pottery, everywhere!
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