Diversity in Clay is the name of the new ceramics show at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt. It’s an apt description for this richly varied assortment of works.
The title could just as well be Constancy in Clay or Continuity in Clay, as the eight creators who have been brought together here share well over 200 years of combined experience at shaping earth into art.
It is a practice that, as ceramicist Ray Niebergall described it, is literally grounding: “I enjoy the quiet calm that clay brings to my inner being,” Niebergall wrote in his artist statement.
“In our world that is so changeable and abstract, touching clay brings me back to my roots, back to my humanity and re-connects me with my creative spirit.”
Along with Niebergall and his wife, Bev Niebergall, there are new works by Liz de Beer, Patricia Forst, Jack Ploesser, Pia Sillem, Elaine Futterman and Mike Allegretti.
There’s more talent and expertise on display here than can be adequately described or done justice to in a brief article.
Every corner of the Doris Crowston Gallery at the Arts Centre is populated by unique sets of works and many of them larger pieces than we often get to see at many ceramics shows, where the wares are easily transportable out to the car.
Forst, known for her burnt-amber-stained and sectioned landscape sculptures, has brought a work, for instance, called Sunrise, measuring about 66 inches (168 cm) by 15 inches (38 cm). And Ray Niebergall’s Cyclopes Under the Cedars stands about 40 inches (1 m) tall. Size might not matter, but the scale is impressive. How big can these artists’ kilns be, one has to wonder.
Kilns are where much of the magic happens with glazed ceramics and working with them can involve the preparation and anticipation of a ritual. In his statement, Ploesser confided that, “about once a month pyromania sets in and I fire the kiln, and with a little prayer to the kiln goddess, I unload a bounty of pots.”
It can also be a painstaking process requiring commitment and endurance, as Sillem described it. “Our woodfire kiln is carefully stoked for 55 hours,” Sillem wrote. “When the temperature reaches 1,235 degrees Celsius, we hold it at this temperature for 24 hours. At such high temperatures, wood ash melts and fuses with the clay. This is what gives woodfired ceramics its unique colour and texture.”
Futterman uses a different method. “Firing with salt allows for textures and colors to develop which are unattainable in other methods of firing. As the salt is introduced to the kiln, it vaporizes and makes its way throughout the stacks of pots, creating a glaze where it hits the clay and leaving other areas more matte.”
You can learn more about the process directly from these creators at an online meet-the-artists session from 2 to 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 18, the final day of the exhibition.
