From cool clay to hot glass, a few Eastside Culture Crawl teasers

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      With more than 300 artists working in every imaginable medium, it’s not easy choosing which studios to hit during the Eastside Culture Crawl, which runs Friday to Sunday (November 20 to 22). As a quick teaser, here are a half-dozen that caught our fancy.

      Heydey Design (The Mergatroid Building, 975 Vernon Drive)
      Ceramist Claire Madill loves hitting vintage shops, and her old dishware discoveries find new life in her works. Making moulds and using slip casting, the grad of what was formerly called Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design has transformed dozens of discarded canning jars into clean, white porcelain. The result is an art object that makes you nostalgic for Grandma’s kitchen, but fits perfectly into contemporary décor. “I introduced the vintage jars last year and it was great to see people’s reactions,” Madill says. “Whether they’re men or women, it resonates with people and they recognize it from their past”¦.They’re not functional as jars; it’s the idea of the jar.” What’s new: Madill has added to the sizes and shapes of her old Mason jars, so fans can add to their collections. But heyday is just as well-known for its jewellery; this year, look for earrings made from the intricately ridged bottoms of vintage pickle dishes. The inspiration: “I love the way you don’t get any shadows on glass, but you get these great shadows as soon as you put it in porcelain. I guess that’s why I’ve stayed away from colours.” Prices: Jars go from about $36 to $125; earrings and brooches range from $45 to $72.

      Ross den Otter (Pink Monkey Studios, 830 Union Street)
      Ross den Otter takes 2-D photos and transforms them into swirling, textural paintings. He does it by either transferring a print to acrylic gel and adding colour and gloss, or transferring black-and-white images to plaster and leaving them natural or giving them a painterly wash of acrylic colour. Aside from his unique technique, there’s another reason to get in on the act this year: proceeds from all of den Otter’s sales will go to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of B.C. and Yukon—a tribute to his brother-in-law, who suffered a serious stroke two days before last year’s Crawl. The emergency found den Otter’s friends all pitching in to run his open studio while he was with family at the hospital. What’s new: “I’ve been focusing quite a bit on the trees of Strathcona,” says den Otter, whose new landscapes contrast his Pink Monkey Studios travel-based photos of the recent past. In Solo, a lone, wispy-skeletal tree reaches up to a stormy blue sky. The works range in scale from tiny 3-by-4-inch pieces up to wall-filling 15-by-75-inch landscapes. The inspiration: “I had always looked at photos like, and I think the art community looked at it like, it was the ugly stepchild. People see it as repeatable. So I wanted to make it more one-of-a-kind.” Prices: $60 and up.

      Mike Kammerer (The ARC, 1701 Powell Street)
      Kammerer spends half his year working in geology, prospecting in the Yukon, and the other half creating his eerily beautiful, fossil-like sculptures. Some, like Ichthyosaur, his nine-foot-long, hanging dinosaur-dolphin creature, are made from a skeleton of smooth, grainy, laminated wood and rice paper that’s lit, lanternlike, from within. Kammerer shows in galleries, but his only other Crawl appearance was in 2006, so this is a rare chance to look in on the studio where his prehistoric hallucinations come to life. What’s new: The mod meets the biological in works like Kammerer’s Portals, a cell-like group of smooth wooden chambers whose inner spaces are painted in bright, shiny acrylic shades like lime green, turquoise, and yellow. The inspiration: “I started out working mostly from my head, but I do spend a lot of time looking in the library and doing research,” he says. “A few years ago I made the pilgrimage to the Royal Tyrrell Museum [of Paleontology in Alberta] to sketch things—not to mimic them but to understand biological structure.” Just don’t assume his creations are straight-up science; Kammerer is also heavily influenced by music—its structure and its repetition of forms. “I don’t like to say too much about my inspiration, because I don’t want to limit people’s responses to the work. There are many things overlapping in the work for me; I could never say it’s just one thing. I think the big connection with geology for me is the vastness of time—the feeling of looking at something from an incomprehensibly distant past, and the mysteriousness of that.” Prices: $1,500 to $12,000.

      Clockwise from left: Ross den Otter transforms photos into textural paintings; Mother and Bricks turns books into handmade artworks; and Braden Hammond twists gold and silver up into the glass of his new fumed pieces.

      Mother and Bricks handmade books (The Mergatroid Building)
      Beautifully crafted from materials like Japanese printed papers, cotton, linen, silk, and ribbons—all stitched by hand—Kayla Preston’s books are works of art. Some of the edges on the paper have been carefully hand-torn, sliced meticulously with a letter-opener-like tool. Not surprisingly, a few of her customers are sometimes too awestruck to write anything in them: “They have this fear of what’s going in the book. They say, ”˜I like it but I don’t want to write in it.’ It’s so special they don’t want to use it,” Preston says, but adds they’re definitely crafted to be hardy enough to both hold text and be looked at through the years. “They’re all one-of-a-kind.” What’s new: Preston, who moved into the studio in 2007, has never been on the Crawl before. Most of the books she’s making are used as journals, but more recently, she’s introduced photo albums with accordionlike spines: the more pictures you put in them, the more they expand, and when you stand them up, they fan out artfully on a tabletop or mantel. The inspiration: While Vancouver-raised Preston was studying printmaking and sculpture for her fine-arts bachelor’s degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she took bookmaking out of curiosity. When she returned here, her friends and family started asking her for books to give as presents. “I thought about how many books I’d been making and realized this is what I should be doing,” she says. Prices: $40 to $160.

      Fiveleft leather (Parker Street Studios, 1000 Parker Street)
      Lincoln Heller’s purses and wallets look chic and are kind to the environment. Drawing from ancient saddlery traditions, he tans his cowhides in nontoxic vegetable-based dyes and makes impressions on the leather with recycled objects like bolts and bicycle spokes. “It has this balance of being really rough and raw and utility and yet it’s really sophisticated and slick.” What’s new: Known for his line’s rich, warm-brown patinas, he’s introducing a “crazy bright blue-and-red stripey combination” during the Crawl this year. Look for it in his popular, structured lunchbox purse. Also on hand, a new mutchclutch with a slick clasp of industrial hardware: “That’s a good thing to have for winter parties.” And in the men’s gift department, he’s also crafted a new range of wallets; urban, minimalistic, and practical, they go for about $40 to $60. The inspiration: Heller learned his art at an Alaskan logging camp, where he used discarded boots to make tool pouches. (He was working there to pay for art school.) He’s obsessed with using handcrafting traditions that have been lost to technology and mass production. “The only machine I have in there [his studio] is a car buffer. Even my sewing machine is hand-wound.” Prices: About $40 to $400.

      Braden Hammond (The Mergatroid Building)
      This is Hammond’s first Culture Crawl, and he’ll make a spectacular debut—the glass-blowing artist will be flame- and lampworking outside, in the parking lot by industrial bays at the back of the Mergatroid. Hammond is best known for his jewellery: artful, ethereal pieces that mix colourful glass art with high fashion, in everything from bangles to oversized rings and bulbous pendants. But he’s also making the news as a finalist in Absolut Vodka’s Absolut Vancouver contest, which will award up to $120,000 for an art project in this city; Hammond’s proposal is called City of Glass and would see installations connecting Gastown to Yaletown. What’s new: The showpieces at the studio this year are two one-of-a-kind chandeliers built from hundreds of glass pieces: the Aquatic Carnival blends blues and caramels, while Blue Lightning mixes cobalt with purply blues. Hammond’s newest jewellery creations are gold and silver fumed pieces, in which sterling silver and 24-karat gold twist up inside the glass. The inspiration: “I really draw from the Italian glass masters, as well as Dale Chihuly’s bigger installations. It’s sort of a West Coast spin on Italian glass.” Prices: The chandeliers go for $4,200 and up; jewellery runs from about $30 to $180.

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