Harvest Baskets
Cultural Capital of Canada Project 2012
Niagara has been designated a cultural capital of Canada,
along with Calgary. I am a participant
in two Niagara projects affiliated with this program. Both projects were an open-juried
competition for Niagara artists.
The first is “Harvest Baskets”, a mixed media project by a
group of artists, from different parts of the Niagara Region, working in
different media.
The project is based on large photos of the escarpment,
divided into panels, with each artist interpreting a section of the panel in
their own medium. These panels will then
form two large murals for the Regional Headquarters in St Catharines. As well as the two mixed media murals, there
will be five individual panels dealing with Harvest and Niagara’s Bounty.
My panel is based on a photo taken of a collection of
discarded, broken, wooden fruit baskets.
My medium is porcelain mosaic. I
treated the subject by pressing and stamping different dates, months, and words
such as Apples, Cherries, Pears, etc., along with small icons of the same into
thin sheets of porcelain. I then applied Iron Chromate to the sheets of
porcelain and wiped them like an etching plate, leaving black printing.
The sheets were then fired in a kiln,
fractured, and set as mosaic pieces to fit the design of the baskets.
I used a black grout to give the overall
effect of a drawing.