Céramique à Way's Mills 2024
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Expo-Sale
Fabrica Ateleia is a small-scale brand defined by the efforts of a single artist. The focus is on the art of tableware, with ceramic objects that vary from one to the next. These are distinctive pieces, conceived and designed to bring harmony and elegance to a space, while being an integral part of everyday life.
As she feels that pottery saved her from a future that was not meant for her, healing is a recurring theme in Evelyn Charette's work. She feels each movement in the present by touching the clay. At times subtle, and at others explicit, she explores this theme through collections such as "Le remède" or "My Medicine." Her new collection, "La fleur," aims to bring together admirers of beauty and gentleness through a symbolic emblem. Her pieces, imbued with finesse and softness in mint and peach colors, are also adorned with simple and comforting patterns. Other works, stemming from a more illustrative and intuitive practice, reflect her deep connection with the visual arts.
Since childhood, Suki Craig has loved playing with clay, kneading it and feeling it in her hands. Today, despite her urban roots, she transforms this passion into unique, everyday objects that pay homage to the natural world around her. She needs to work with her hands, to create by giving free rein to the movement of the wheel. Her work focuses on the production of utilitarian pieces in small series and one-offs destined for smokestacking and coated with terra sigillata. Shades of ochre, black and burnt orange are obtained with various fuels burnt in old metal buckets.
The practice of Catherine De Abreu is intimately linked to her way of existing: she creates in order to better understand what inhabits her and to better communicate. Her approach questions human nature and society, and is geared towards sustainable consumption on a human scale. Through the use of decals on her pieces, she explore themes dear to her. She seeks to create a connection with people through her handmade pieces, hoping that a part of her is transposed into her work and nurtures a strong bond between the creator and the end user.
For Nadi artiste céramiste, walks by the sea or in the forest bring a sense of well-being and fulfillment. Through her creations made to accompany daily rituals, she strives to return us to the present moment, as do the texture of a pebble or the soft interior of a shell. She communicates her love of nature in her ceramic objects made from natural stoneware. The shapes are round, soft, comforting and invite the touch. She uses a variety of production techniques, including throwing, molding and handbuilding.
Judith Dubord's practice is formal, combined with an intimate poetic-playful exploration. Attracted by craftsmanship and the transformation of matter by fire, she works on the wheel and by handbuilding, to explore volume and form of vessels. She seeks contrasts between form and decoration, with humor, exhuberance and effervescence as the building blocks of her visual language. The coexistence of simplicity and fantasy, and the exploration of the fine line between delicacy and disorder are at the heart of her approach. Her favorite themes include intimacy, rootedness, volubility and incongruence.
Patrick Duclos combines classic and modern, glossy and matte, playing with multiple levels of contrast to transform a utilitarian piece into a work of art. Inspired by the textures produced by his self-made tools, he enhances his pieces with randomized patterns. After an initial firing, he adds lustrous glazes made from raw materials. Motivated by a deep need to create, he offers an alternative to mass production and invites people to create rituals for themselves. His pieces, combining ancient practices and modern tools reflects the contrasts present in his way of being.
The beauty of nature is Judith Faber's main source of inspiration. Ever since her childhood spent in the woods with her Huron-Wendat grandmother, her hunting-loving Métis father and her family, she has been marked by the vastness of the forest and the teachings of her elders.
Shapes, textures, colors and everything alive in nature fascinate her. Parcels of this creation, including animals, are reflected in her work. Through her work with clay, she calls for the protection of Earth.
At ateleï, Leïla Firdaous creates aesthetic, timeless, practical and useful objects designed to bring tranquility and harmony to everyday life. Using throwing, handbuilding and molding techniques, she also makes her own glazes and molds. Sustainability and eco-friendly practices are central to her approach. The LAGOM collection, inspired by the Swedish philosophy of life based on simplicity, the natural, and balance, adopts a contemporary, streamlined aesthetic. It invites us to slow down our pace of life, with colors and textures inspired by the Scandinavian winter landscapes.
A ceramist trained at the Centre de Céramique Bonsecours (2014), Stéphanie Goyer-Morin also holds a bachelor's degree in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2009). Founder of Goye artiste céramiste, she creates both decorative and utilitarian works in her Rosemont studio. Inspired by fairy tales, she infuses everyday life with a dose of magic and absurdity through objects capable of generating stories and wonder.
V. Fleising uses clay as her medium, because for her, earth is the material that unites us all. She works instinctively, using her hands as her eyes and clay as her language to communicate. Her aim is for her pieces to provoke thought and feeling, creating a sense of presence, magic and ongoing exploration. Her artistic identity is inspired by nature, feeling, color, the Arts and Crafts movement, surrealism and visionary art.V. Fleising creates utilitarian, sculptural and decorative objects that communicate in alternative and complementary ways to language.
Paul Guidera departs from the traditions of pottery while paying homage to them. His pieces are strewn with hybrid, narrative figures that blend references to childhood, adolescence, humans and animals. These humanoid creatures interpret everyday scenes, drawing on various myths and life stories to question the boundaries between personal and universal. His playful and hybrid pieces combine figurative and utilitarian. Borrowing monstrous elements, he blurs functionality and brings to life what we know as inert. These imperfect creatures become animated companions, forging sensitive, intimate bonds in everyday life.
Elizabeth Hamel aims to create works of great simplicity, purity and fineness. Devoting herself to working with porcelain, she masters this temperamental medium to produce creations of the a pure aesthetic. A master in the art of taming the flame with each firing in her gas kiln, she creates pure porcelain exteriors of an immaculate white, as well as copper red enamel interiors with unique, refined effects, ranging from deep reds to suave celadons. Constantly in search of beauty through her medium, she passionately creates modern, refined utilitarian works imbued with elegance and lightness.
After working as a graphic designer for 20 years, Isabelle Huot felt a strong desire to fulfill her artistic potential by moving away from the computer. Dipping her hands into clay satisfied this need. Her ceramics are inspired by nature: from sprouts to flowers, from shells to pearls. She throws, handbuilds and casts porcelain playing with the illusion of fragility, thinning the lips of her bowls and objects, which pushes the material to its limits and increases the technical difficulty of drying. Finally, she creates connections through the shapes of her containers, evoking tulips, callas, shells and mushrooms.
Behind Juliette Joubert's practice lies the idea of sharing, which led her to tableware. She uses throwing and handbuilding to create her pieces, seeking a visual and technical balance between the two. She likes to play with the contrast between throwing's rigor, structure and symmetry and the irregularities and organic qualities of handbuilding. Her practice is characterized by the exploration of expressive designs, marked by imperfection, spontaneity and movement. She aims to appeal to everyone's inner child. She wants her objects to transport people into a gentle, joyful universe, full of dreams and poetry.
Eve m Laliberté cherishes the rigor and contemplation required to make a mold and the precision it brings to the reproduction of a piece. She loves the freedom of accidents revealed by splashes superimposed along the path of her brush. Handbuilding and throwing leave the imprint of her gesture in the material, creating perfect imperfections. She is inspired by Japanese watercolors, art nouveau, the forest, industrial design and architecture. The circles decorating her pieces are a visual mise en abyme, where raw material transpires in a clean space through the chaos of organic ornamentation.
Michèle Lavallée uses shapes, drawings and engravings to express herself. The repetitive gesture on the wheel has a meditative effect, while handbuilding brings an organic aspect to her creations. She seeks to bring beauty and positive emotions into people's lives. She places great importance on the ergonomics of her pieces. Recently, she has returned to the use of translucent clay, encouraging reflection through light. Seeing herself as a craftsperson with an artist's heart, she expresses her sensitivity and love of nature, finding balance and motivation in creation and experimentation.
Julie Lavoie's work involves the production of utilitarian tableware and teaware objects, primarily fired in a high-temperature wood kiln. The ancestral technique of wood firing guides her creations, combining tradition and modernity. She develops her visual signature with wood-firing, a physically and technically demanding process. She favors natural hues and pure forms, allowing the material and firing effects to express their own language. Everyday objects, clay, water, fire, forests, plants, minerals and the passage of time are all integral to her artistic approach.
Chantal McNeil has been a potter for over 10 years. For her decorative pieces, she uses a smoke firing technique, which adds unique colors to her sigillated clay work. Her creations are inspired by the colors of nature, the shores of the St. Lawrence River, the blue-gray hues of water, the green of forests, and the blacks and rusts of mountains. Each piece is an invitation with the mark “Jeter l'ancre ici” and captures the poetry of the landscape in the palm of your hand, offering a corner of the country to take with you, like a pebble chosen on the beach.
For Sharlotte Novoa Guandique of Art Hic et Nunc, ceramics are a means of expressing her Latin culture in Quebec. Each piece is unique, reflecting a piece of her history and significant moments in her life. Her passion and expression shine through in each piece, and she revels in revealing the imperceptible stories behind them. Sharlotte is as passionate about the pure, unique contact with clay as she is about her acrylic-on-canvas creations.
Francine Potvin sculpts theôrô objects that invite contemplation, ritual and poetry. Working mainly in handbuilding, she explores the notion of the vessel as receptacle through various forms. In her sculptural proposals, she explores spontaneous connections between the human, the microcosm and the macrocosm and revealing surprising correspondences between the products of the earth and the marine world. Through her artistic commitment, which is at once ethical, poetic and spiritual, she wishes to pay tribute to the prodigious inventiveness of life and to the sacred aspect of all things.
Zacharie Potvin Williams is an interdisciplinary artist. He loves clay for its ability to blur the lines between mediums. He enjoys working with majolica glaze for its stability and porcelain-like qualities, making it an excellent base for painting illustrations. His creations often explore the magical attributes of botany and the healing potential of nature, aiming to blur binaries and maintain a playful, sometimes humorous approach. His vibrant and striking works, which celebrate nature's spellbinding power and expansive sexuality while being functional.
Christian Roy has been a potter since 1998. He has wheel thrown for a number of Quebec potters for over 15 years and, for the past 10 years, has devoted himself to his own production. His wheel-thrown and hand-engraved pieces are geared towards tableware, designed to enhance the beauty of food. His collection lies somewhere between traditional and contemporary art. He invests a great deal of time in perfecting his technique, as he believes the beauty of a piece of pottery lies in its ergonomics and the experience it provides.
Marie-Ange Samon has been a ceramist for 30 years, using an ancestral technique that she has refined over time in a contemporary direction. Her inspiration comes from her roots, universal sacred memory and her love of animals. Her work involves handbuilding from coils and porcelain slabs.
His utilitarian pieces are produced on a potter's wheel, while his sculptural pieces are handbuilt. Marko Savard navigates between these two worlds while searching for satisfaction and balance. His production is made up of small collections revisited from time to time, at times playful and colorful, at others more subdued and obscure. With the objects he makes, he offers a very personal vision of ceramics that bears his signature.
In her studio in Gore, Joan Scott produces a wide range of stoneware and porcelain forms, drawing creative inspiration from the environment's tranquility, reflected in the earthy colors and textures. Working in cycles of throwing, handbuilding, and firing small groups of vessels allows her to explore new forms. With functional pieces, she aims for simplicity and functionality, handcrafting all glazes from raw materials. Much of her current work is fired in a small anagama kiln, a traditional Japanese wood-fired kiln.
Since childhood, earth has been Marie Serreau's chosen material. In 2000, she returned to clay in Montreal, and in 2002 trained as a ceramist at the Institut européen des arts céramiques in France. After her studies, she traveled and collaborated with ceramists in several countries, enriching her artistic reflection. Now based in Pointe-Saint-Charles, she works in earthenware, relishing its suppleness and color. She lets herself be guided spontaneously by the design, painting and engraving each unique piece. She also explores sculpture with characters and nesting dolls, telling stories linked to childhood.
Fabienne Synnott treats each piece as a composition in its own right, necessarily emerging from the earth while retaining its trace. Her inspiration comes from nature. Fascinated by the “primitive”, she cultivates a quality of presence in her contact with the earth. Her artistic process consists in harnessing constraints and giving free rein to the spontaneity of gesture, with both brushes and precision applicators. Her pieces, inspired by both British and Japanese traditions, are distinguished by their fluid form and aim to become a portal to the self, magnifying the daily rituals.
For Bianca Lee Thibert, the practice of ceramics is a form of mediation. The gliding of clay under her fingers gives her a feeling of great serenity. She keeps in mind that she's working with a living material and gives it the space to express itself. Retouching her pieces after throwing them is for her an intimate dialogue with the material. As a result, her creations carry with them an attention to detail and the conscious gesture of adding beauty to everyday life. What constantly guides her is the desire to bring gentleness and care to everyday gestures and rituals, inviting us to slow down and appreciate.
Since 2018, Pascale Tétreault has been learning the various techniques of the trade by working alongside and for fellow ceramists. With a degree in graphic design and currently studying art history, she combines contemporary and ancient visual cultures in the development of functional and sculptural objects. She enjoys mixing techniques and constantly presenting new creations.
Arts Trail
The Fire Arts Pathway
Collective outdoor exhibition
Performances, demonstrations, and conferences
Held in the context of Céramique à Way's Mills
From June 21st to July 1st, 10 AM to 6 PM
Vernissage: June 20th, 5 PM
Rozynski Art Centre
2133, chemin de Way's Mills
Barnston-Ouest (Québec) J0B 1C0
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
A Tribute to the Artists of Way’s Mills
At the turn of the 1960s, a community of artists from Montreal, working in metal and ceramics, emerged in the hamlet of Way's Mills. Comprised of Morton Rosengarten, Louise Doucet and Satoshi Saito (Doucet-Saito), Wanda Rozynska and Stanley “Buddy” Rozynski (Rozynska Pottery), they were later joined by George Foster. Together, they transformed Way's Mills into an exceptional place were, to this day, art merges with life.
By showcasing artists creating art with fire, this exhibition seeks to honour those who contributed to the establishment and development of Wanda and Buddy's studio and school, now the Rozynski Art Centre.
The Fire Arts
The fire arts are production activities based on the transformation of mineral materials by heat: rocks (metals), earth (clay) and sand (silica). First appearing in Mesopotamia over 4,000 years ago, they were perfected during the Bronze Age. Based on clay-firing kilns, furnaces were developed that could reach temperatures high enough to produce metal alloys. It was during this period that glass first appeared, made from molten sand. A Roman invention, glassblowing emerged later, some 2,000 years ago.
Today, the fire arts encompass craft and artistic practices related to ceramics, metallurgy, glassmaking and enameling. Although the artists participating in this exhibition work with different materials, they share a common passion for the transformation, through fire, of the fundamental materials of our planet.
Artists
Enamels on metal
Ceramics and Glass
Metals
Metals
Ceramics
Ceramics and Metals
Glass
Curator
Bruno Andrus, PhD, is a glassblower, art historian and independent researcher.
His artworks have been exhibited internationally and are now held in different museum collections. Throughout his career, Andrus has combined his passion for the arts and glassblowing with his scientific interests in history and anthropology. His current research-creation art practice, inspired by experimental archaeology, is geared towards investigating ancient molten glass technologies and techniques.
His master’s dissertation focuses on the history of glassblowing and fine crafts in Quebec. His doctoral thesis highlights the impact of Expo 67 on the international development of modern glass art. The technical expertise and the knowledge he has acquired has allowed him to publish, curate exhibitions, offer lectures, and educate on a variety of subjects.