UH 'camp' productive for potters
By Wanda A. Adams
Assistant Features Editor
The East-West Ceramics Collaboration III may have a high-sounding name, but it's pretty easy to define. It's summer camp for potters.
Workshops: Today through Aug. 9, UH-Manoa ceramics lab Free public slide presentations by visiting artists: 7 p.m. tomorrow, Thursday, July 23, 25 and 30, UH Art Auditorium Ceramics Futures symposium: speakers Paul Greenhalgh, Jo Lauria, Paul Mathieu, 2 p.m. July 21, UH Art Auditorium Open House: 9-11 a.m. Aug. 3, UH-Manoa ceramics courtyard Exhibition: Sept. 1-27, UH-Manoa Art Gallery; Student exhibition, Commons Gallery Information: 956-5264; swolfe@hawaii.edu
The 16 ceramicists — distinguished artist/teachers and their most advanced students from Asia, America and Europe — arrive with nothing but their ideas and their tools. They spend a month living in University of Hawai'i-Manoa dormitories, taking meals together and creating new pieces in the UH pottery lab. They hold a formal symposium, give slide shows for the public and take a little time to see the Islands, too. In the fall, the works they have created are gathered in an exhibition that the artists, who by then have returned to their homes, don't even get to see.
East-West Ceramics Collaboration III
It is an intense, challenging, chaotic, stimulating time, said UH professor and ceramicist Suzanne Wolfe, founder of the project. But if it gets even a handful of members of the public to better appreciate ceramics, it's worth the work.
"What's really important is what it brings to the community. Each year, more and more people have been involved, attending the events, even visiting the workshop to observe the artists," she said. "Ceramics is in all our lives, it's the tile in your bathroom, the pistons in your car, the insulators in your telephone wire. My goal is to get people to appreciate this extraordinary medium."
Wolfe got the idea from a Czech friend who described symposiums in Europe where artists worked alongside each other. The first Collaboration took place in 1995, the second in 1998, paid for by gifts and grants that Wolfe has cobbled together. The artists pay their own airfares; room, board and art supplies are provided. The artists contribute at least one of the pieces they've created to be sold to help pay for the next Collaboration.
On Wolfe's shoulders is the task of selecting the invitees, networking through the small world of ceramic arts in search of people who are doing cutting-edge work in a variety of media and are willing to rough it a bit and work cooperatively.
It all begins today. Meanwhile, Wolfe says, the only thing she'd like — just once — is to get to go to potter's camp herself, without having to run it.
