West Meets East, an exhibition that includes many of the artists I went to Fuping, China with in 2007, opens today at Harbinger Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario. From the exhibition announcement:

Harbinger Gallery is pleased to present “West Meets East,” an exhibition of ceramics by Canadian artists who have created a body of work during or after visiting China. Curated by Ann Roberts, “West Meets East” is an exhibition that explores the many ways that Oriental culture has affected the visual language of artists who have recently visited China. Works included are by Katrina Chaytor, Ying-Yueh Chuang, Susan Collett, Charley Farrero, Trudy Golley, Judith Graham, Sin-ying Ho, Paul Leathers, Ann Mortimer, Paula Murray, Grace Nickel, Catherine Paleczny, Gilbert Poissant, and Jim Thomson. Please join us on Saturday, May 1, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. for the opening reception. Curator, Ann Roberts and some of the participating artists will be present. All are welcome.

I am happy to announce that I am participating in Earth Matters, the 2010 NCECA Invitational exhibition in Philadelphia. The show, installed at the Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, opened on March 13 and runs until April 10, coinciding with the 44th annual NCECA conference, March 31 to April 3. I will be attending the conference and the opening of the 2010 NCECA Invitational, which takes place on April 1 at 7:00 p.m.

It is an honour to have been selected for this exhibition, curated by NCECA Exhibitions Director Linda Ganstrom. I am showing my porcelain piece, Devastatus Rememorari, for the fourth time, and once again had to source 400 lbs. of salt for the floor of the gallery. I would like to extend a special thank you to Robert Croker of Crozier Fine Arts for his unrelenting and successful search for glistening, white road salt in the middle of March in Philly. I am also grateful to Linda Ganstrom and her husband Sheldon for all their help during the installation that took place two weeks ago. Congratulations to Linda for putting together a beautiful show! Thank you for including me.

A full-colour catalogue for the 2010 NCECA Invitational exhibition will be available.

Photos by Gabrielle Lavin.

I’m working hard in Oz preparing for the show at Perth Galleries, but also taking time to meet some of the locals. Bye for now!

GALLERY ONE ONE ONE

GRACE NICKEL & WILLIAM PURA Curated by Cliff Eyland 13 July to 18 September 2009

CLOSING RECEPTION: Wednesday, 16 September, 5-8 PM

(Artists in conversation with curator Cliff Eyland at 5 PM)

A couple of photos taken while installing work in Gallery in the Park, Altona. The show will be open on Friday, May 15.

I have had my work Uprooted – Winnipeg 2007 accepted into the Unity and Diversity Exhibition at the Canadian pavilion of the Cheoungju International Biennale in South Korea. The Biennale, which runs from September 23 to November 1, 2009, is the largest and most outstanding fine craft-based biennale in the world. Dr. Sandra Alfoldy of NSCAD University has been appointed the national curator for the event. Congratulations to Manitoba artists Teresa Hudson, Carol James, and Alan Lacovetsky, who will also have their work shown in the biennale.

A solo exhibition of my work will be on view at Gallery in the Park from May 15 until July 5 in Altona, Manitoba. I’ll be showing a few of my large architectural works and installing Devastatus Rememorari, which was created in Halifax, Nova Scotia in tribute to Point Pleasant Park, a large urban reserve devastated by Hurricane Juan in 2003.

As a lead up to the exhibition at Gallery in the Park, Lori Penner interviewed me and wrote an article in the Red River Valley Echo called “When Nature and Culture Collide,” in the Red River Valley Echo, April 24, 2009. PDF: penner_echo_20090424.pdf.

Students of Craft, May 12 to mid-September, 2009. Opens May 12, 3:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

By Elissa Barnard, Arts Reporter,
Halifax Chronicle Herald, May 22, 2008

Manitoba artist Grace Nickel was amazed when she took her first walk in Point Pleasant Park in August 2006.

“It was incredibly moving and powerful. It still surprises me every time, just the scale of the loss there.”

Nickel has created an elegant elegy to the devastation of Hurricane Juan in an installation of white porcelain trees encrusted in a bark of printed text, handwriting and woodsy textures. The eight trees stand as stumps, as tall figures with broken tops or as leaning pillars on a floor of rock salt that is shaped into a giant teardrop pattern. The lights at the Mary E. Black Gallery are dimmed to allow for reflection.

While this piece, called devastatus rememorari, is specifically inspired by the trees in Point Pleasant Park, it is more broadly about loss in nature and in human life, about remembering and rebuilding.

“There seem to be so many natural disasters and other types of destruction that are human-made,” says the recent NSCAD University graduate. “I didn’t imagine I’d live to see what I’ve seen and I’m constantly in need of memorializing events and people.

“I hope it extends beyond my personal need,” she says. “We need a place collectively to bring some of that grief and I hope for healing and recovering.”

To build the ceramic trees Nickel worked from three sections of one storm-wrecked tree that came from a friend’s cottage “from a friend who’d died so it was very meaningful,” says Nickel. (Point Pleasant Park officials don’t allow the removal of wood.)

Seven trees are variations on this one tree and the tallest is imprinted with newspaper stories published Sept. 30, 2003, after Hurricane Juan. One can read the headlines but not all of the print. “I want them to be about memory and the way memory can be somewhat fuzzy and faded,” says Nickel.

“One nice thing about the show is people tell me their stories. People who were here feel compelled to tell me.”

Nickel has also handwritten in looping patterns of slip clay the words devastated and the Latin devastatus and remembered and the Latin rememorari.

Text is very much a part of memorial monuments, says the artist and university instructor, who also refers to the history of monuments in her use of bronze glaze. “I find in Halifax there are a lot of commemorative monuments.”

Seven trees are skeletally white and the eighth has a dark, non-metallic bronze glaze. It leans in a fall towards the grouping of white trees. “I wanted it to stand apart. The idea is it is reaching out to the others. The others will be out of reach and that connects to memory or loss.

“When I was here I actually lost many people,” says Nickel.

She became fascinated by road salt, which is not used in Winnipeg, when she came to Halifax to study for her masters degree at NSCAD University. “In Halifax I saw this white residue on everything.”

When she started researching it, she realized the box of Sifto she’s always used comes from Nova Scotia, so she decided on glittering chunks of road salt, from both the Sifto mine in Amherst and a mine in Pugwash, as a base for her work.

The salt metaphorically links to the duality of recovery and destruction within the whole piece. “It’s been used as a preservative for many years. In terms of trees and the idea of rebuilding trees it would be devastation. Salt destroys.”

Raised in Winnipeg, Nickel has been photographing trees, often the ones damaged in flooding, for the last five years. She first made art about trees last summer when she made an uprooted tree for Winnipeg’s Subconscious City exhibit.

Nickel went to China last October with a group of 10 Canadian artists invited to create work for the permanent collection at the new Canadian Ceramics Museum, one of a series of 10 international ceramic museums being built on the site of the Fuping Pottery Art Village.

“You can’t bring any work with you and I decided to make a tree there. It started to evolve into a commemorative tree idea. There they often put petrified trees on pedestals with the text on them.”

Fuping is 70 miles from Xian City, famous for the terra cotta warriors and horses, and only 600 kilometres north of the site of last week’s devastating Chinese earthquake. “Apparently, of all the ceramics in the museum only five broke and three can be repaired,” says Nickel, who received an e-mail about the damage. “None of the Canadian pieces broke.”

Leaving Halifax soon to move back to Winnipeg, she says she is not done working with trees. “I don’t feel I’m finished. I’m going to teach this summer on Vancouver Island and I will go to Stanley Park because it’s also suffered a huge loss and I want to photograph the devastation there.”

Devastatus rememorari: Grace Nickel’s Memorial to Point Pleasant Park is at the Mary E. Black Gallery, Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, 1061 Marginal Rd., right next to Pier 21, through Sunday. The gallery is open today, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. [The exhibition concluded in May 2008.]