RITISH
COLUMBIA
a

“Canvas” for imagery,
Continued from Page 6

“canvas” for his photo-transferred and painted
imagery.

Untitled (1981) is an olla of unglazed
earthenware, painted with a natural mineral
pigment. Here, a ring of shamanic figures
encircles the vessel’s opening, as though
mediating the passage between human and
spirit worlds. The motif is part of Beam’s
personal iconography of visual images that
we begin to recognize as we move through
the exhibition, and can see reinterpreted
throughout his vast body of work. The artist’s
aim was to provoke contemplation of multiple
realities and our collective place in the
cosmos, offering a far-from-subtle critique on
the place of reason and linear thinking in the
colonial expansion of Western society. As the
exhibition's curator, Greg Hill, makes clear,
Beam’s art engages Anishinaabe knowledge
through its recognition of the important roles
of dreams, the place of spirit helpers, and the
lessons of Aboriginal ancestry. At the same
time, it builds intellectual bridges between
the philosophical thinking of Western and

Anishinaabe traditions.

Beam constructed all of his ceramic pieces
by hand out of slabs or coils of clay, using this
method to create a variety of plate forms, open
bowls, and olla-shaped vessels. The large platter,
Re-Alignment (1984), is an example of his
glazed earthenware on which he experimented
with new image-transfer processes borrowed.
from commercial applications. Here we can
see two identical images of the Plains Cree
leader, Chief Poundmaker, who became a key
figure in the 1876 negotiations for Treaty Six
in Saskatchewan. Beam had varnish decals of
Poundmaker’s image made, and applied these
to the ceramic surface. He also used stenciled
text—a significant component in much of his
art—layered over an image of a flying eagle,
to make visual and conceptual connections to
his works in other media. The square plate,
Geronimo (1985), features a varnish-decal
image of the renowned Apache leader and
medicine man, together with a joker playing
card and other images, ona surface influenced
by Oribe and Kenzan styles of Japanese
pottery. Several vessels in the exhibition,
such as Raven (1983), incorporate images of
birds, variously juxtaposed with numbers,
horizontal lines and grids, and images and
science’s

notations referencing Western

modes of measuring and calculating the

Art_Ttavel

201 1 CERAMICS*EXGURSIONS

Crete
Sept. 19-Oct. 4

Morocco
Oct. 13-Nov. 3

Geronimo, 1985, by Carl Beam. Glazed
earthenware, 4 X 27.9 X 28.6 cm. NGC.
Photo © Harquail Photography (used with
permission).

natural world—and the limitations of linear
understanding.

Beams passion for ceramic making
continued for the rest of his life, and he and
Ann (and later their daughter, Anong) would
always collect local clays and natural pigments
wherever they travelled and lived. In the late
1990s they expanded their pottery practice
to build a house on Manitoulin Island, with
thousands of adobe bricks they made by
hand—a process that, like their ceramics,
became a way of expressing a deep connection
to the earth, and creating an art inseparable

from life.

Karen Duffek is the curator of Contemporary
Visual Arts & Pacific Northwest at UBC's
Museum of Anthropology, She would like to
acknowledge the exhibition catalogue, Carl
Beam: The Poetics of Being, edited by Greg A.
Hill (National Gallery of Canada, 2010), and
the exhibition texts, for information about Carl
Beam’s ceramic practice.

BC-in-a-Box

Volunteer
Graphic Artist
Wanted!

The BC-in-a-Box committee is looking
for a volunteer graphic artist to help
design email-able invitations, a brochure
and/or promotional material for the
exhibition. If you are able to help, please
contact Jackie Frioud at jfrioud@shaw.ca.

Thanks!

Potters Guild of BC Newsletter - May 2011