EXHIBIT
Back to the Land: Ceramics from Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands 1970-1985
Where: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
When: Opens Friday, 8 p.m. Runs through Feb. 3
Admission: $13 adults, $11 seniors/students, $2.50 youth, $28 family, children and members free
If the oodles of artisans are any indication, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands are fertile ground for creativity. Among those who flocked here and flourished were the potters of the back-to-the-land movement, the subject of a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
"There was a terrific growth in ceramic practice," said guest curator Diane Carr. "And there's been no history written about it."
The gallery's opening exhibition for the season, which runs through Feb. 3, features works by 31 artist who created ceramics between 1970 and 1985. Most arrived from Europe or the United States, seeking a more basic lifestyle.
"People were looking for a simpler way of life and they were starting to do things like grow gardens and can - it was all about sustainability. And so along with those things went a resurgence in the crafts," said Carr, who owned a studio in Victoria called The Potter's Wheel and was the founding director of the Cartwright Street Gallery in Vancouver, which became the Canadian Craft Museum.
"People wanted to work with their hands and people wanted the products of people working with their hands."
This may be the first major exhibition to focus on local potters from this period, she said. Vancouver-based artists typically overshadow all others in the discourse on B.C. ceramics - but those from Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands were successful, too. Three artists in the show (Robin Hopper, Walter Dexter and Wayne Ngan) earned the Saidye Bronfman Award, Canada's foremost distinction for excellence in fine crafts, and some were exhibiting internationally. Potters from Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands helped put the province on the map in the realm of ceramic arts, she said.
"Ontario was quite well developed, Alberta was quite well developed. But from that point on, B.C. didn't have to take a backseat to anybody. The work coming out of here is first rate," Carr said.
The pieces in the show fall into one of three stylistic camps: European modernism and the Bauhaus, the Leach/Hamada tradition, as well as abstract expressionism.
The opening is Friday at 8 p.m. On Saturday at 1 p.m., some of the artists will talk about their lives and work. At 2: 30 p.m., Canadian historian Nancy Janovicek from the University of Calgary will give a lecture on the back-to-the-land movement in B.C. in the 1960s and 1970s that set the stage for creative production.
Cheap land, new firing methods, as well as a hostile political environment in the United States during the Vietnam War made the islands an attractive spot to many artists at that time, Carr said.
"This is not to say that there were no potters before that time, because there were," she said. "It's just to say that there was tremendous growth."
