After a very educational morning at THE MUSEUM (see previous blog post) we as a class broke for lunch and made it over to The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery. The Gallery seemed like returning home as I had done an internship with Shelley Crawford at this organization back when I was attending The University of Waterloo. However, the rest of the class, while having never actually been here before, felt a familiar sense as well because of how often this gallery is spoken about in class through Shelley’s didactic stories and examples or from projects based on events that the gallery hosts. Many students were impressed by the building’s award winning architecture but myself and a few others were excited by the artwork.
We were lucky enough to have a discussion with William Poole the Executive Director or The Clay and Glass Gallery as well as its curator Sheila McMath. We were very appreciative that they were gracious enough to share their personal stories and experiences in their fields and from their time at the gallery and were interesting to hear from. However some of our listening was impaired by the sound of buttons moving around, as one of the artworks was a film with sound of buttons which correlated with the button sculptures beside it.
Hearing Sheila talk about the exhibition and explain what we were looking at was certainly helpful. The largest area was displaying the work of Lou Lynn’s COMMON/unCOMMON , which “reinterpret the familiar and ask viewers to reconsider the beauty inherently found in functional objects”. Ione Thorkelsson’s work touched on the bizarre in what Sheila nicked named her ‘Frankenstein works’ with her show A natural history of Utopias. This half features “hybrid creatures, modified plant life and an accumulation of animal ‘bones’ made from glass casting that are beautiful and troubling”. Over all this show was one of my favourites that the Clay and Glass has put on and I am happy to have been able to see it!
This Fall Exhibition is still running until December 31, 2016 and is worth checking out when in the K/W area! theclayandglass.ca.
