EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA
Masters GalleryCalgary, Alberta403-245-2064 |
Mountain GalleriesWhistler, B.C. |
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Mountain GalleriesBanff, Alberta |
Gallery OneToronto, Ontario. |
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Mountain Galleries Jasper, Alberta |
Gardiner Museum of CeramicsToronto, Ontario |
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Scott GalleryEdmonton, Albertascottart@planet.eon.net 780-488-3619. |
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The Canadian Clay and Glass GalleryWaterloo, Ontario |
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Prime Minister of Canada
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Alberta Art Foundation |
Government of Canada, External Affairs,
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Chancellor of McGill University |
British Petroleum |
Northwestern Utilities |
Alberta Federal and Intergovernmental
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Government Of Alberta, Creative Services,
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Canadian Public
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Steelcase Corporation |
Claridge Collection, Montreal
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The Westin Hotel |
Burlington Art Gallery,
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World Ceramic Exposition Museum |
Archie Bray Foundation
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His Imperial Highness Prince Takamado
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Minneapolis Institute of Art
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Skutt Ceramics
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International Ceramic Expo Ceramic Museum, |
Art Gallery of Alberta |
Finland Ambassador to Canada |
President of Kyoto Women's University |
Japanese Consul General to Alberta |
Tatsuzo Shimaoka, National Living Treasure of Japan |
Auckland Studio Potters |
Mazankowski Heart Institute, |
The Pottery Workshop Gallery Collection, |
Alberta Teachers |
Dwight M. Holland Collection |
American Library Association President Loriene Roy |
Movies"Clay in Hand", Karvonen Films Ltd. for Bravo Arts and Entertainment TV, 30 min., 2005Books"Studio Ceramics in Canada, Gail Crawford, Goose Lane Editions, 2005An Alberta Art Chronicle: Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art
, Mary-Beth Laviolette,
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Ceramic Art and Perception |
Ceramic Review |
Ceramics Monthly |
Fusion |
Contact |
West |
Legacy |
Western Living |
Alberta Venture |
Trompe L'oeil Pots |
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Our way of creating the large illusionistic pots could best be termed constructivist with ready- mades. We make round and oval discs by press molding, which are then cut and altered, stacked and joined to form segmented pots. By using ovals cut on the bias, we can get gestural pots with a lot of movement. We like the way they look much like a pot in a painting by Matisse or Braque or Picasso. With their cut down front rim and slightly comic handles, they become a kind-spirited caricature of historic "real" pots. We are interested in painting flat things to look round and round things to look flat. These pots are about perception; that is, those visual clues that let us know the nature and dimension of things. With color, pattern, figure/ground, shading, silhouette and by using many "universal referants", we create visual gaps that the viewer fills up with their own constructed reality. Our pots usually have an illusionistic pot or a pot-on-a-pot "front" side and the reverse side often becomes a shaped canvas for a figurative/narrative glaze painting. With figurative, classical and humorous imagery, we try to join the gestural quality of drawing and painting with the innate gesture of ceramic vessels. These vessels present the viewer with the ambiguity of classical themes and contemporary painting. |
Exploring Earthly Delights: Mundane and Beyond |
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When we stayed with Harry Davis in New Zealand in 1980, he told us the life of the potter was "mundane". With huge hue and cry we said it was anything but boring (what most North Americans mean when they say mundane). Oxford and he said it meant "of the earth". Latin mundus. On reflection, our work for the last several years has been dealing with the attempt to transcend and sometimes recapture the mere earthiness of common clay. Three territories we have explored: Majolica terra cotta, translucent porcelain and wood fired stoneware are all different ways of transforming raw materials into something beyond the ordinary. We offer for exhibition these three different types of work as dimensions of our continuing exploration. The majolica presents both the formal (illusionistic) and the painted world with our recurring themes of nature in flowers, still life, figuration and mythology. The translucent porcelain is a man made material transformed by the fire to make a glass; a white ground for intense color and the carving and drawing of naturalistic motifs. Lastly, the wood fired stoneware are special pots that have "been somewhere" - they have experienced an extreme assault of ash and flame, a thermal wind that decorates them with scars and blushes where they have been touched by nature. At their best they resemble a beautiful "found rock". We are back then to the earth. We learn by handling clay how far it will allow us to take it. We are the instrument - it is the transcendent material. It is a constant challenge - anything but "mundane". |
Why We Make Utilitarian Pots |
| Carol and I have been making
pots for use for nearly thirty years and although we do other kinds of work as
well, we are still challenged and fascinated with making functional pottery. In
part we have been influenced by other potters who saw function as a transcendent
positive attribute of their ceramic work. We worked two summers in the late 70's
with Harry Davis and while talking about the potter's life we discovered a
curious linguistic anomaly. When we stayed with Harry in New Zealand in 1980, he
told us the life of the potter was "mundane". With huge hue and cry we
said it was anything but boring (what most North Americans mean when they say
mundane). Oxford and he said it meant "of the earth". Latin mundus. On reflection, our work for the last several years has been dealing with the attempt to transcend and sometimes recapture the earthiness of common clay. Three territories we have explored: Majolica terra cotta, translucent porcelain and wood fired stoneware are all different ways of transforming raw materials into something useful beyond the ordinary. The majolica presents both the formal (illusionistic) and the painted world with our recurring themes of nature in flowers, still life, figuration and mythology. The translucent porcelain is a man made material transformed by the fire to make a glass; a white ground for intense color and the carving and drawing of naturalistic motifs. Lastly, the wood fired stoneware are special pots that have "been somewhere" ? they have experienced an extreme assault of ash and flame, a thermal wind that decorates them with scars and blushes where they have been touched by nature. At their best they resemble a beautiful "found rock". By handling them in their domestic context, the user can sometimes connect with their naturalism. The "bizen style" tea bowl with it's feldspar inclusions is similar to a black granite rock spit from the earth and polished by nature. We are back then to the earth. We learn by handling clay how far it will allow us to take it. We are the instrument ? it is the transcendent material. It is a constant challenge ? anything but "mundane". |
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| Clay and Glaze - Our
Artistic Practice |
| We make all of our own clay and glazes and although it is an
incredibly labour intensive activity, it is one of the things that makes our
collaborative work unique. We make about six different clay bodies from native
materials from all over North America. Our terra cotta body is from Athabasca,
prepared from the raw clay which we get by the dump truck load, mixed wet and
screened and dried up to plastic consistency after adding flux, a dash of barium
carbonate and grog and sometimes nylon fiber. It would be cheaper to by these
clays pre-made from a supplier but they are often not available and lack the
consistency and thus control we demand. We make about three different high fire stoneware bodies from materials from southern Saskatchwan (Ravenscrag), northern Idaho (Helmer) and Montana. In some of these we put feldspathic stones or stars which come from the Fraser canyon near Lytton B.C. One of these is a dark, bizen style, body which is sometimes decorated with our translucent porcelain. Our porcelain is made from pure kaolins from Georgia and England, feldspar from South Dakota and fine silica from Illinois. We fire it to about 2400F. on the verge of slumping to get translucency and luminosity. This body is blunged as a slip and dried up to plastic on cloth on the ground and aged for developing plasticity. Developing all these clays has been a labour of love, research and testing. Sometimes we feel like medieval alchemists. Our glazes are also the result of decades of testing. More recently we have been using a lot of native materials. These include the feldspathic rocks from Lytton, cedar ash from Barriere, B.C.,other wood ashes from Clancy, Montana, and Priddis, and Hairy Hill, Alberta. We use gneiss from Hope and the Northwest Territories and our terra cotta clay from a glacial backwash in Athabasca. We have also used two varieties of volcanic ash from the eruption of Mt. St.Helens. All these materials are refined and ball milled to form glaze which gives special colours and effects from the included mix of minerals. This is a kind of special soup which has trace elements which are a mystery even to us. We see this as a way of using the gifts of the earth, some like the volcanic ash, dramaticaly given, to enhance our artistic creations. Our majolica glaze colours which form a palette of nearly sixty, are composed of stains and oxides which we have tested after mixing and screening with our base majolica glaze. They are painted on the white unfired majolica glaze (like a water colour on blotter paper) and then fired in the final glaze firing. Finally, some of the work is glazed and fired a third or fourth time with over glaze enamels and real gold. All our work - the small stamps, stencils and trailing designs are created by us. What you find at our studio is a unique mixture of our knowledge and experience accumulated nearly thirty years in both the technical and decorative side of ceramics. |
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Carol and Richard Selfridge |