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.