COMMENT

BELLA COOLA .... Near the end of March I was fortunate
to take a flight on Wilderness Airlines to Bella Coola
to give a weekend pottery workshop. The flight is a
sreat experience - one goes towards Williams Lake, over
Black Tusk and the coastal range, skirting Cariboo
country before diving between snow covered mountains
and colorfully striated rock cliffs to the Bella Coola
Valley. The visual richness of our province is un-
relenting.

Ten or twelve of us gathered and worked with clay at the
Nusatsum Elementary School. As with many smaller commu-
nities, most people make pots part time - as jobs,
families, school bands, amateur theatre productions, and
other community events (like the Alkali Lake Rodeo) will
permit. There are also those who are seriously committed
to making a living from their clay work. Up the valley
a short distnace is the Firvale Tile Works - producing

a great variety of silk screened ceramic tile. If you
visit "World Mosaic" in Vancouver or drop by Estrins

you will see examples of the work. Neil Ehrlich has
efficiently laid out a studio - and although somewhat
isolated, appears to be developing markets. We also
visited a Bella Coola woodworker doing some of the most
sensitively made furniture, walls(!) and valences I've
ever seen.

So, if you visit Bella Coola, do a little digging around
and soak up the powerful landscape people live in. We

may do another workshop next year. One of the quieter

and seemingly more conservative members of this year's
Session suggested, in a moment of sombre reflection, that
we do the next works hop in the nudel If this does occur
it would more than likely be a handbuilding course a
little closer to the warmth of summer in order to maintain
a semblance of democracy everyone (and not just the
"Instructur") would have to approach the clay with a little
more intimacy than they have before. Such a workshop
might even attract people to clay who haven't previously
considered such a material. To the naked eye, the
possibilities are awesome, but even if future clay week-
ends are done totally clothed, the people and the country
around Bella Coola are enticing and appealing.

4 Bob Kingsmill.