The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

i g f c f r * . < Wednesday, April 28, « ^ V T l U f ; , - - ^ (y 1 2 0 N A V Y ' * PAftVlLLE, ONTARIO U /2Z 4 THE OAKVILLE BEAVER D1 130 NAVY ST. 813-2021 o \ Photos by Barrie Erskine Karli Sears is a third-year student in the glass studio of Sheridan College's School of Crafts and Design. Artisans' showcase This weekend Sheridan College will be holding its annual Open House, Point o f View, which show­ cases the work of its students in the arts programs: animation - classical, filmmaking, and computer, applied photography, art and art history, art funda­ mentals, new media design, corporate communica­ tions, journalism, crafts and design - ceramics, fur­ niture, glass and textiles, illustration - technical and interpretive, interior design, media arts, visual mer­ chandising arts, and theatre - music/performance, theatre and drama, and technical production. All the studios will be open for visitors to browse through, with first-, second- and third-year work dis­ played in separate areas. Faculty and alumni will be selling their work in the cafeteria. This show and sale will take place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both Saturday (May 1 st) and Sunday. This month's Love o f Arts & Entertainment sec­ tion will focus on six of those programs represented at the Open House - four from the School of Crafts and Design and two from Illustration. All the work from the School of Crafts and Design will be for sale and priced according to time involved, experience of the artisan, size, colour, materials, and so on. One of the most difficult things for the students participating in the Open House, they said, was pric­ ing their items to reflect materials and labour. And most said that, since they are "only students," they have probably under-priced their work. However, they added, the gratification they get from creating a work of art compensates in some way. Clay items are useful and express creativity By Carol Baldwin ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Wendy Mitchell-Burke has a special technique for shaping teapot handles, and she's been getting lots of practice lately. The third-year ceramics student is busy creating a vari­ ety of ceramic items for the Open House. Mitchell-Burke's interest in ceramics and in textiles began back with some part-time high school courses, but the functional and three-dimensional quality of pottery prompted her to choose it over textiles when she was faced with that choice in her second year at Sheridan. "I have a background in architectural drafting...I worked in that field for five or six years, drafting for an architect...I actually got more involved in the illustration end," explains the 31-year-old, who lives in Belfountain with her husband. "Once I started making actual three- dimensional forms, all the interest I had in drawing and designing came together for me - the opportunity to design something, and use it, and make it an expression of myself...There's something about working with clay that really grabs me." The ceramic artist already has a potter's wheel and small electric kiln set up at home, thanks to the woman who lived in the house before Mitchell-Burke and her husband arrived. The studio is separate from the house, built on a hill in "a sort of tree house...at one point it's three feet above the ground, and at another point you can walk right under it. So it's a really nice space," she says. "It got me started working at home right away." Inside the studio "tree house", the potter plans to devel­ op her own business, ultimately with a separate gallery space. Right now her home is a showcase for some of her work, with a lot o f her pottery becoming one-of-a-kind gifts for family and friends. "I've had a few small commissions through a sweet shop in Georgetown. So I 'll maybe be doing some whole­ sale through this sweet shop, and then working towards some stores in my own little town. I need to start getting to know my own community.. .I'm looking forward to it," she says. "And down the road, I really want to build a gas kiln. All the work at school is high-fired, reduction gas. I 'll have to rethink my work a little bit when I get home." Mitchell-Burke did a research paper on getting a kiln set up at home, and she is planning to help a friend build a gas kiln. In the meantime, she is planning to work with an established potter through the summer, then get down to business in Belfountain. But her next exhibit will be, o f course, the Sheridan (See 'Getting' on page D4) In glass, being a 'blow hard' is good By Carol Baldwin ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Glass blowing is a good way to develop your lungs and make money at the same time. And the glass studio at Sheridan College isn't a bad place to be on a cold winter day either. However, if you want to open your own glass-blowing business, you'll need a little more space and capital than someone in ceramics or woodworking. But that didn't stop Karli Sears from choosing it over ceramics - something she had experimented with and liked before and after enrolling at Sheridan. "Ceramics would have been comfortable, something I had done before...I could see myself getting a pottery wheel and a kiln and doing it," she says. However, she adds, she still recalls being intrigued by glass work in a decorative arts museum in the Czech Republic a few years back. "Glass - there's not a lot of people who do it. Where it would go for me, I had no idea. But the material itself is what decided for me," she explains. "The way I wanted to work and what I wanted to express, visually, I could do through glass. And there are so many pos­ sibilities that haven't even been touched on with that material. In terms of artists using it, it's a new medium." And, she adds, the equipment used in glass blowing as well as the studio environment were also new to her at first. Then there was the 2400° heat in the furnace and the temper­ ature of the glass she had to work on. All in all, it was scary and awkward at first, Sears says. "You really have to get a feel for the glass. And now I have that, and I don't have to worry about it. My hands go where they are supposed to go," she says, adding, "Glass blowing is like a dance. You have to put your whole body into it. You can't think of any­ thing else. Your mind has to pick up on all the signals." Although the glass pretty well does what the 24-year-old wants it to do now, she does­ n't set out to control it when she puts the blow pipe to her mouth and starts creating. "It's possible to learn a technique where you can be very, very controlled, and you draw out a form and use that exact form. That takes great skill, and I've learned some of that. But I really like to use the qualities of the glass, the heat and the gravity and the forces that are there when I'm working the glass. I let the glass deter­ mine the final shape." However, she adds, she does have a con­ cept in mind when she begins, and she does exert some control over the form, unlike her first few months in the studio when the prop­ erties of the glass often took over. And, she warns, glass will get too thin and simply crumble if you blow it too much. "Now I can see in the colour of the glass what temperature it is, and then feel how much it moves on the end of the (blow) pipe," she says, explaining that if she wants to make a bowl of a certain size, she can do that. She just prefers to create more glass sculptures than bowls. And many of those sculptures are of clear glass, since students are responsible for buy­ ing their own colours, in either powdered form or in condensed rods of pure coloured glass. One bowl that Sears will have in the Open House was created by layering colours. "In the last year, I've worked with colour in layers, layering transparent colours over opaque colours to get a new colour," she explains. "What frustrated me was colour, it was either this blue or that blue. You can't mix it like paint. So with this layering of colours, I can choose new colours that are richer." Sears will have a few sculptures in the Open House, including one she is currently working on that includes paper in combina­ tion with the glass. This talented young artist also has a job to go to when she graduates next week. She'll be a resident artisan in the glass studio of Toron­ to's Harbourfront Centre. "One of the six res­ idents has to be working at all times during public hours, which is seven days a week," she says of her upcoming job. "Mainly it's to provide craftspeople with a studio...for their benefit to support emerging craftspeople. Especially in glass, it's so expensive to build my own studio or to rent space in and existing studio. It would slow down my work." The studios at Harbourfront also provide the public with an opportunity to see crafts­ people at work and to buy original Canadian works of art at the adjacent Bounty Craft Shop. However, Sears already sells some of her bowls to a design shop in Vancouver. "There are selected objects that I've designed with the same colours and forms that I use in my sculp­ ture work, - objects that can sell, that are pos­ sibly useful," she says, adding that she and some other students had the opportunity to attend a conference on glass art and partici­ pate in a student exhibition in Japan last year. Someone from a Boston studio saw their work and invited them to exhibit in her gallery this year. "The American market is much different, especially for collectors buying this type of w ork.. .It's starting to be a big thing that peo­ ple collect," she says, adding that she sold the one piece she had in the Boston exhibit even though she was unable to attend. She was too busy working on a commission project with two graduates of the Sheridan glass program. "It's a large glass installation for a home in Toronto. It will take time over the next three months, but basically it's a one-month, full­ time project that we've spread over three months," she says, noting that she will be in the final month of that commissioned job while she's working at Harbourfront. "I will be busy in June blowing glass every day." In the more distant future, Sears would like to emulate the Harbourfront concept, building her own studio in conjunction with other arti­ sans, and having a gallery shop on the side where they can display and sell their work. In the meantime, potential customers can see her work at this weekend's Open House or at Harbourfront. Weed; Mitchell-Burke is a third-year sttP dent in the ceramics studio of Sheridan College's School of Crafts and Design. Photos by Peter C. McCusker