Grace Nickel: Arbor Vitae @ The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery

by | Jan 15, 2015 | Uncategorized


January 18 to March 15, 2015

 
Arbor Vitae is a body of work resulting from an intensive two
years of research including artist’s residencies in Jingdezhen, China,
exploring fabric formwork at the Centre for Architectural Structures and
Technology, and experimenting with fabrication technologies at
AssentWorks in Winnipeg.
 
Incorporating Rapid Prototyping technologies into her work, Grace Nickel’s
large-scale porcelain tree sculptures and installations negotiate the
relationships between the natural and the fabricated, rural and urban,
the austere and the embellished, growth and decay, and life and death.
Her newest work advances her investigations of natural forms pitted
against artificial construction and surfaces separated from and
reintegrated with forms.

Grace Nickel is a practicing ceramic artist who teaches at the University of Manitoba.

More at GraceNickel.ca, Facebook

Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery
25 Caroline St. N, Waterloo, Ontario

Opening reception Sunday, January 18, 2015, 2:00 p.m.

Grace Nickel, Host, 2015. Photo by Michael Zajac.

Distributary | Manitoba Crafts Council | curated by Chris Pancoe | 27 July – 3 September

by | Jul 31, 2012 | Uncategorized

images courtesy Chris Pancoe | 2012

“From the beginning of time, people from around the world have
manipulated clay into functional, decorative and sculptural forms. 
Easily accessible and versatile by its very nature, clay has long been a
popular medium for sculptural works and was one of the earliest mediums
humans used to document the world in which they lived.  For historians
and archaeologists, clay works have provided information on how humans
once conducted their daily lives, maintained relationships and social
order in addition to offering insight on their belief systems.

Distributary, curated by Chris Pancoe, will bring together
the sculptural works of seven ceramic artists who live (or have lived)
in Manitoba:  Trudy Golley, Carmela Laganse, Grace Nickel, Kelli Rey,
Kevin Stafford, Peter Tittenberger, and Lin Xu. Distributary examines
how these artists use clay as a medium to document their interactions
with nature, everyday objects, and/or popular culture.
The title Distributary was chosen for the aptness of its
definition: a river that branches off of and flows away from the
mainstream.  Not only is the title appropriate because clay is mostly
harvested from riverbanks but also for the way in which each artist
chosen for this project has individually branched off of and flowed way
from the mainstream, challenging the notions of clay as craft and
flowing into contemporary contexts.”

2nd Floor,
290 McDermot Avenue,
Winnipeg, MB
R3B 0T2 |
tel: (204) 944-9763 | email: [email protected]
www.aceart.org

New work by Grace Nickel

by | Nov 4, 2010 | Uncategorized

Grace Nickel, a new assistant professor in Ceramics at the School of Art, recently saw her sculpture Donors’ Forest unveiled at the Beechwood National Cemetery of Canada in Ottawa. The piece was commissioned for the entrance-way to the new Memorial Centre that opened at the Beechwood Cemetery in 2008.


(* note i couldn’t get a large enough image of the piece discussed, sorry)
Her sculpture, consisting of a series of porcelain tree trunks resonant of birch trees, includes a seven-foot tall, forked tree sitting in the centre of her Donors Forest. The tree mimics the Y-shaped wooden columns in the Memorial Centre’s Sacred Space. “For my Donors’ Forest, I chose to work in the tradition of the commemorative tree. The inscriptions on the trees’ surface commemorate the soldiers, poets, politicians, and the cultural diversity of the Canadians buried at the Beechwood Cemetery,” Nickel said in her artist’s statement. The piece simultaneously exudes a warmth that the viewer finds inviting, a place, perhaps, to find solace. But the austerity of subject ultimately interrupts the onlooker’s reverie, forcing her to reflect on a different set of emotions. “The commissioned piece recognized the generosity of donors who made the new Memorial Centre possible, but for me it also had to commemorate the contribution of people who have gone before us. I’d say what was most poignant for me was the recognition of the young soldiers in the military cemetery.” Images of monuments in the cemetery have been transferred onto the tree. Nickel inscribed lines from a poem by Archibald Lampman, a quote from Tommy Douglas’s epitaph: “Courage my friends, ‘tis not too late to make a better world,” and excerpts from John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, in English and French. There is also an image of the entrance marker to the Chinese section of the cemetery as well as leaves and other plant matter Nickel collected on the cemetery grounds embedded in the porcelain; the organic matter burned off in the kiln-firing, but its impressions remain.via link