MCC Presents: First Fridays in the Exchange, Featuring Mary Lowe
Opening: Friday, April 5, 2013, 5-9 pm
Work on display until April 26, 2013. Click here for office hours.
Manitoba Craft Council – 553-70 Arthur st
Artist Statement:
“I am a rural Manitoban who works with clay. I Iive in a farming community where fields and yards are populated with animals of all sorts. I find them beautiful and charming. I sculpt with clay, dry it and fire it. Many artists and crafts people do this. I feel however, that I am personally challenging myself to build larger and at the same time more delicate work.
Clay is a heavy, slumping medium. For casting purposes armatures can be used to lift the clay into otherwise impossible positions. Because I must dry and fire my work I have to support my pieces from the outside. I must lift them off the ground onto slender legs without collapse. This has been a long battle between my vision and my reality of heavy slumping clay.
I love working in clay and trying to outsmart its natural tendencies. Sometimes the clay wins but usually with persistence I can figure out a way to come close the image I’m trying to create.
I want to take a lifeless ball of clay and create something as beautiful and expressive as my subject matter. I am a craftsperson trying to perfect my craft, trying to learn my material and trying to take it to new and expressive forms.
I feel that my work is not craft alone because I always want to communicate and express the beauty of animals, their elegant forms and their way of being.
I do what I do without too much thought about is it art…or is it craft. The line is blurred, it is what it is.”
First Fridays in the Exchange is dedicated to bringing together artists, artist run centres, galleries, businesses and the public for a greater understanding, appreciation and promotion of the arts and the further development of a vital Exchange Area community. See the full listings here.
