Sandra Bilawich’s presentation of mixed media pieces in the Gallery can be appreciated in many ways.  Two strong references are immediately identifiable; the natural world, and the mechanical.  Sandra’s work, both purely sculptural and/or functional is comprised of metal and metal machine parts, found objects, stone, and glass.  All these elements are either entirely manipulated or used as they are ‘found’.  This is an interesting and playful aspect to the work.  In one piece for example, a stone rounded and smoothed by nature is hollowed out to form a bowl at the base of a plant form fabricated in metal, which has flowers comprised of steel cogs.  This piece alludes to the natural world, using both natural objects and machined parts. 

Sandra has a wonderful sense of identifying.  The shapes she recognizes are enhanced by her manipulation and mixing of materials which often contrast with each other.  Metal, which predominates, is worked and finished to reveal various textures and qualities of light and reflection.  With the same sensitivity, glass and stone are also altered.  Although metal, glass, and stone are hard materials with impenetrable surfaces, Sandra’s forms expose their different textures and surfaces. While working within a limited palette, Sandra is able to reveal the smooth and polished softness of a stone, the watery fluidity of a reflection in steel, or the chipped edge of a block of ice.

Female torsos in stone or petrified coral are elegantly simple and strong renderings.  The natural beauty of the stone is realized, carefully shaped and lovingly polished to reveal flowing curves and the warm softness of flesh.  In contrast, small side tables and pedestals are designed to function as sturdy and reliable pieces of furniture.  Evident throughout the grouping is a confident use of form, line, and texture resulting in works that are confident, playful, and complex.

Ron Kong, 2006

March 3 - April 4, 2006

As you enter Fredi's show you see two rows of cups on black shelves against a lively green wall. It is wonderful to watch people come in, go to the cups, pick them up, really look at them, spend time with them. They are traditional cup size and small, Mexican inspired 'tequilitas', and each cup is a work of art, playful and balanced. The handles, like all her handled forms, work functionally as well as enhancing the overall form. For Fredi, "a wall of cups is about one of the great pleasures of being a maker" and the joy comes through every piece in the show.

Here are vases, jugs, teapots, serving dishes, plates, and covered jars to accompany the cups. Fredi's surface decoration is unbelievably complex, A rectangular serving dish has a pres-molded floral design overlaid with a colurful translucent glaze, in contrast to the dark matt glaze covering the rounded, textured rim. Then turn the dish over: the base is a different colour in contrast to the dark matt of thee handles and feet, and there is also a slip-trailed image of an old telephone dial. Images of trucks trundle round the base of a covered jar, and across the top and bottom of a plate march silk-screened dinosaurs. Fredi's playful sense of humour owes much to her 4-year old son Henry. He is learning to draw,"doing amazing images," and the time spent drawing together is transposed into her joyous designs.

Another inspiration is her garden, and the 'act of faith' involved in pondering the relationship between what goes in and how it will turn out - like a group of vases, their base wheel-tuned, the graceful body hand-formed from a clay slab. In contrast are squared, slender thrown vases, wire cut and coated in rich red terra sigillata With, a tiny blue tile pressed into the surface.

The little tile is a typical surface decoration. Press-molded handprints, flowers, and geometric shapes interweave several different layered techniques. White or coloured slips are trailed under a multitude of clear coloured glazes, or left on their own. Shiny and matt glazes in an amazing graduation of tones relate, or contrast, with each other. Pieces are often high-lighted by areas of terra sigillata which covers the bare clay with a satiny, smooth red surface. Black oxide brush strokes may define a child's face or a flower, drawn under or over a clear glaze. In addition the wet clay also accepts imprints by thin-lined metal or sponge stamps, photo transfers, and a variety of silk-screened images.

Fredi is a mother, a potter, a teacher and a gardener, innate sources from which she can draw to pour out the abundant fruits of her labour.

A brief personal note in conclusion. In 1970 I opened a store to sell Canadian crafts in Kingston, Ontario, even though people said, "But there aren't any Canadian crafts". We stripped old beams in my store and along one beam hung a row of mugs. They were baric mugs, brownish, well shaped serviceable - but also they were the forerunners of a huge growth of craft skill which has slowly flourished in Canada over the last 35 years. And in 2006 I am glad that Fredi and Cathi delight in making their distinctive, domestic tableware, demonstrating what Suetsu Yanagi called "the beautiful truthfulness of domestic hand made craft".

Thelma Ruck Keene
Gallery Committee

Katherine Soucie is an adventurer in the volatile territory of clothing, navigating her terrain with confidence and zest from a sound background of textiles, fashion and the technology of printing. As for the shaped notes of this show, they are the inspiration of her surface designs which spring from the unique shapes of musical notes — especially the those of Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley and Johny Cash.

Katherine's textiles range through hemp/cotton, silks and other natural fibres and — something very new — cotton or polyester blended with crab or shrimp shells (crabyon and seacell knits). Her surfacs design integrates embroidery, stitching, and natural dyeing with digital printing processes which deconstruct the images by exposing them to computer obstruction and manipulation. They are then developed on Photoshop and Illustrator, and printed directly on the fabric, the small format on Canon 1860, the large on an Encad 3000 — the latter done while at the Kansas City Art Institute in June 2005.

This is heady stuff and a good moment to introduce my guest commentator, Yvonne Wakabyachi. For years she has been a special friend and active member of Circle Craft. Her textile art is renowned internationally, and it would take too much space to list her awards. Like Katherine Soucie she also is an adventurer whose textiles combine traditional and modern techniques and marry the creative sensibilities of East and West. She is beloved by countless students in the Fashion Design Program of the University College of the Fraser Valley, and at Capilano College in North Vancouver, for she is a teacher who knows how to push her students just a little further. Her special expertise is shibori, a process of dyeing which begins with the cloth wrapped round a pole, compressed and tied with string. It was devised to make soft indigo dyed cotton for summer kimonos. But for Yvonne shibori bnecomes a tool to create exquisite textile sculptures. So she appreciates Katherine Soucie and writes:

Katherine Soucie should have the last word: "Through natural curiosity for working with non-traditional materials I will continue to develop, design and produce textiles and unique, functional/practical garments which express our individuality. I feel that the mass production of garments and textiles today creates a need to rediscover, or reinvent already existing materials, so that we maintain awareness and an appreciation of what is individual in ourselves."

Thelma Ruck Keene
Gallery Committee

Don's conclusion belongs to the writing which Sandy displays in his show. He says it is by an unknown author, but wishes he had written it, so here it is:

Sometimes the opening of the work develops into something larger and takes on the dimensions of cracks and fissures. As with patches of rot which may occur in older pieces of wood, these I regard as characteristics, not defects. It is in the nature of wood to be like this, and unless these features make a piece structurally unsound, they are incorporated into the work in their own right and on their own terms.

The only blemishes to be found in my work are those I put there myself; the wood is flawless by definition. This is not a belligerent disregard or denial of what would usually be regarded as defects, or a romantic refusal to admit to such, but rather a realistic acceptance of the wood for what it is, an organic material having very human characteristics. To put aside or eliminate all wood that is not "perfect" and free from cracks, rot, splits, and variations in structure is a kind of arboreal eugenics, a philosophy to which I cannot subscribe.

Without asking, Shakespeare elbowed in here:

...And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.
I would not change it

Thelma Ruck Keene
Gallery Committee

Lisa Samphire’s intricate glass art is a spectacularly beautiful show, a must see for anybody interested in fine work. Vibrant  colour and complex patterns glow richly under the lights. The interplay between opaque, translucence, and transparency gives great depth to the material, while the matte surface that integrates the pieces allows the eye to appreciate the form.

A screen of photographs explains the many processes, which are expensive and labour intensive. Fist of all, glass sheets of different colours are stacked, heated in the ‘glory hole’ until they fuse together, then stretched down like toffee until they form a column about an inch square. Dimensions vary according to the shape of the original stack and how fine it is pulled.

The columns are then sliced like a salami into little, flat patterened squares or oblongs called ‘murrinis’. Now, using as many different murrinis needed to make the desired design, they are laid out flat to form one sheet, which is again heated until all the pieces fuse. This hot, beautiful sheet is then rolled up until its edges meet to form a tube, one end of which is sealed with more glass. From the open end it can now be blown and formed into the final, desired shape. Each process slightly distorts the straight mechanical lines of the original stack until the lines finally curve and flow, seeming to have grown naturally into beauty. A final grounding and polishing to even the surface brings out the pattern clearly and smooths the form.

Lisa cites butterfly wings, Persian carpets, the painter Hundert Wasser, and pixels on the computer screen as some of her influences drawn from the world’s myriad patterns.

Over to you, Thelma!

And with thanks for such a joyous sendoff I’ll go over to Lisa Samphire and tell how she was captured unawares, by glass.

In 1980, she graduated from the University of Victoria with an hounour BFA in Printmaking, and during her student years she needed a job in the holidays. Luckily David New-Small was a neighbour who had turned his garage into a small glassworks, and needing someone willing to be useful, gave Lisa the job.

It was, of course, a perfect way to get the feel and rhythm of glass blowing without being aware of it. When David moved his studio to Granville Island, combining it with a store that grew into a gallery, Lisa was happy to look after the store and customers. There was, of course, plenty of odd bits of glass around, and she amused herself by making them into earrings. Naturally she wore them, and when someone bought one she was wearing, she made lots more. Then David initiated her in the basis of glassblowing, and one day she made her first piece.

"It was a funny looking object," Lisa says. But the molten glass was full of its own life, and captured her. For the next ten years, 1985-1995, she apprenticed with David New- Small on Granville Island. "He was very generous," she said, "and ready to help me explore. Interspersed with this work she took courses in places like Red Deer College, the Corning Glass Museum, and the Pilchuk Glass School. She also studied with the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute and graduated with a Diploma in 1993. This wasn’t enough. She had to keep pushing her own skill to wherever it could go.

The general public has little awareness of the huge commitment involved in blowing glass. The basic set-up of gas fired kiln and ‘glory holes’ have to be unendingly maintained at very high temperature, and mounting expense. In Vancouver, there are three glass studios: David New-Small’s on Granville Island, Robert Held’s on Pine Street, and Jeff burnette’s on Parker St. In Victoria the Starfish Glassworks was founded in 1997 by Gary Bolt, Morna Tudor and Lisa Samphire. These three had worked together in Vancouver in a group called V6, and Starfish was a brave move which has proved very successful – except rising fuel prices are bearing hard on them and every glass studio.

But these artists do more than make and sell their work. Their studios are open to the public, and provide support and training in this beautiful, ancient craft: only Sheridan College of Art and Design in Toronto offers a graduate glass course. So our Vancouver and Victoria studios play an important role in providing public appreciation and personal training in the trade of this art. For art is work, and art in all its forms is now recognized by educators as vital in the life of the young and old in every society. Lisa Samphire’s show is a clarion call to people in BC to give thought to these dedicated artists and ensure that they can continue to do what they do so well – blow glass into many forms, and specific patterns of light.

CONVOLUTIONS/ DIGRESSIONS
Suzanne Nairme

Suzanne Nairne has titled her show with precise intention. Convolution is the sinuous action of coiling, twisting, or winding together, and Digression is turning aside from the track.These are elements inseparable from the artist pilgrim's process, and Suzanne's brief bio you see the process in action.

As a child she spent many weekends sketching outdoors with her architect father, and she writes, He inspired in me a love for dedicated creative work which,if approached honestly from one's own vision (hopefully combined with some talent) could result in artistic accomplishment..valuable to society. Armed with this vision she chose to be a dancer and performed with a Vancouver dance company throughout BC, and in Toronto and Ottawa. She says, It served me well...creating a passion for attempting to pursue artistic projects (process is exciting).

Next came a six-month digression to Mexico's San Miguel d'Allende taking courses in acting and experimenting with photography. This led to an eleven-year stay in New York. Hand painting found objects graduated to making mixed media jewellery which sold well in 'fashion' and retail craft shows which brought her into contact with independent jewelers, and they inspired her to enroll at The Craft Students League in NYC to study metalwork. The process was on track. Her teacher, Tamiko Kawata Ferguson, was demanding but ready to help independent work. Suzanne writes, I was superbly happy and honoured to learn from her.

Seven years ago Suzanne returned to Vancouver to earn her living designing, making and marketing her jewellery. This city is her birthplace, but New York is convoluted into her psyche and left a longing for travel. In short, I am a mass of contractions,. she wrote before devising the title of her show.

My guest this month is Hélène Bourget, a perceptive commentator, herself being a designer/goldsmith specializing in the wearable art of one-of-a-kind jewellery Hélène has a background in graphic art and painting, a Jewellery Art and Design diploma from Vancouver Community College, and a 5-year apprenticeship in the European tradition with master goldsmith Andrew Costen at Bustopher Goldsmiths. Hélène has been a Circle Craft member since 1990 and currently serves on the board as well as the committee which select work for the store and the Christmas Market. She is good at this, having a rock hard pilosophy; Objects which are thoughtfully conceived, executed wit technical precision and infused with artistic passion, posses a certain energy that cannot be attained in mass production.

Hélène writes:

I recently had the pleasure of attending the opening of one of Circle Craft's regular gallery shows, featuring the impressive skills and imagination of artist/jeweler Suzanne Nairne. Suzanne's work is a beautiful balance of raw and refined, using both traditional techniques and other more experimental forms and materials. Most of the jewelry is Sterling silver with accents of gold and has a sleek, modern look, yet, conversely, is very organic and uninhibited in style, evoking a slightly extra-terrestrial feel. Occasional bezel-set jewels punctuate the pieces just so, adding a "precious" quality to the whole. Suzanne deliberately leaves the oxidized patina on certain surfaces as well as sharp edges on some of her pieces, making them a more sculptural "objet" rather then strictly an adornment. It is clear that Suzanne appreciates and utilizes the fact that the process itself can be very beautiful and inspiring, which in turn contrasts effectively with the more polished aspects of her jewelry. Suzanne's more experimental techniques include translucent resins of varying colours, which are in turn flecked with different particles such as bits of bamboo wood or silver slivers, and then captured in silver frames which Suzanne then fashions into pendants, neck pieces, rings and earrings. The resin pieces have a lovely glow, giving the impression of a subtle and slightly captive beauty. She also brings a conceptual element to her work, having written a poetic definition of convolutions and digressions in both French and English, she then expertly weaves this into her jewelry. Bits of paper with fragments of her poem in both languages are captured in the different coloured resins and framed in silver disks, which are then linked into an opera length necklace, becoming both adornment and statement. I look forward to seeing more of Suzanne's obvious talents as she continues to push artistic boundaries.

And right here are Suzanne's poetic definitions.....

Con.vo.lu.tion

…a form or part
that is folded or coiled
…one of the convex folds
of the surface of the brain.

Between the folds
of my mind,
unrealized projects,
improbable thoughts,
strident hopes
waiting to communicate.

Within folds of the earth,
cycles of growth and decay,
substances natural and unnatural,
species declining and disappearing
shifting to be heard.

In folded newspapers,
and layers of cyberspace,
stories, reports,
interpretations, spins
claiming to reveal.

…so…

a convoluted plea for
communication,
insight to look
under the folds
to draw out the idea.

...a passage that deviates
from the central theme
dance: first art form
bamboo: east / west gift
speech: power of the word.
…

Thelma Ruck Keene
Gallery Committee