A life in ceramics

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This article was published 16/07/2023 (1150 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ceramics require clay, earth and heat, so it’s no surprise Winnipeg artist has a penchant for nature.

The city ceramicist and 2023 winner of the Saidye Bronfman Award — an annual honour from the Governor General for artists who focus on fine crafts such as ceramics, pottery and jewellery — links the visual arts with the environment’s two main forces, life and death, in her new exhibition at WAG-Qaumajuq that received a gala opening Thursday night.

The show is titled Grace Nickel: Inter Artes et Naturam (Between Art and Nature) and is a retrospective of Nickel’s work, beginning with large, richly detailed ceramic moths made in 1989.

It also includes samples from several other exhibitions, such as wall-mounted light sconces and terminus forms inspired by the columns at Winnipeg’s Union Station from her 2002 show A Quiet Passage, which was Nickel’s first solo exhibition at the WAG.

“She explores an elusive and haunting path to the future,” said Patricia Bovey, the recently retired senator and WAG-Qaumajuq director emerita, who was the WAG’s director when Nickel presented A Quiet Passage.

The Bronfman award is the latest artistic summit Nickel has climbed in her four decades in ceramics, which began with drawing sketches at her home in Plum Coulee, which also happens to be where philanthropist Bronfman grew up.

Nickel caught the art bug watching her father leave his sketches of his favourite country-and-western singers around the house. “It made making art normal,” Nickel joked. She later built on that passion by attending the University of Manitoba’s School of Fine Arts, even though she said she didn’t yet know what fine arts meant.

The exhibition takes up two portions of the WAG’s main third-floor gallery. It is curated by Tammy Sutherland of the Manitoba Craft Council, who nominated Nickel for the Bronfman award, and Riva Symko, WAG-Qaumajuq’s head of collections and exhibitions and curator of Canadian art.

It also includes works Nickel has presented at other galleries across the country, such as 2015’s Arbor Vitae (The Tree of Life), which was presented at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery and, most notably, 2008’s Devastatus Rememorari (Devastated and Remembered), a work that pays tribute to Point Pleasant Park in Halifax.

The park was heavily damaged by hurricane Juan in 2003, but it became Nickel’s regular place to visit and a creative hotspot when she lived in Halifax in 2006.

Nickel later gifted the works from Devastutus Rememorari to the Art Museum of Nova Scotia after it was shown at Halifax’s Mary E. Black Gallery in 2008. Much of the second portion of the exhibition is devoted to the Point Pleasant Park tribute.

It includes varieties of dead trees made of porcelain; the ones remaining upright resemble the vestiges of ancient Roman columns, while others were driven to the ground by the hurricane and left to rot. Inside those, for those who crouch to take a closer look, are Nickel’s ceramic depictions of bracket mushrooms.

She has also included new works in the retrospective, suggesting there’s far more to come from the University of Manitoba professor and volunteer with Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and the Winnipeg Art Gallery Studio.

These new ones are wall-mounted decorative items made of porcelain, terra sigillata, rare-earth oxides, glaze and inkjet prints on fabric. Titled Commemorative Cameos, they’re the result of a six-week residency in early 2023 in Hungary and Italy. There, Nickel studied Haban ceramics, which originated in central Europe with Anabaptist artists in the 16th century.

Nickel, 66, mentioned in her speech Thursday that officials with the Governor General, who presents the Bronfman award, put her in a bind when they let her know she won.

They told her in November 2022, but she was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement in late March 2023, much like Jeopardy! contestants who sign agreements to not blurt out the results of the game show they appeared in until it’s shown on television.

She asked if she could at least tell her 92-year-old mother, Elma Nickel. The Governor General’s people agreed.

The elder Nickel died in April but made sure her daughter knew her favourites — the colourful sconces and terminus forms from A Quiet Passage — must be part of the new WAG-Qaumajuq exhibition, 21 years after they were first revealed to the public.

“Although my mother didn’t have a chance to see the terminus forms together again,” Nickel said, “it was very meaningful for her to know that it was going to happen, and very meaningful for myself and my family.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall