Artist wins national competition using homegrown inspiration
Northern artist puts Fort Simpson memories into award-winning installation
April Hudson
Northern News Services
Thursday, November 3, 2016
LIIDLII KUE/FORT SIMPSON
For potter Jennifer McInnis-Wharton, home is the warmth of a crackling fire in a woodstove, stoked and kept by her stepfather, Mike Canney, in the Wildrose subdivision of Fort Simpson.
Jennifer McInnis-Wharton rolls a ball of clay in her hands. - photo courtesy of Jennifer McInnis-Wharton
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McInnis-Wharton is returning home to the village after spending the past three years at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in Fredericton, N.B. She leaves the college on a high note as the New Brunswick winner of the BMO Financial Group's 1st Art! Invitational student art competition.
The competition selects one national winner as well as a regional winner from an art school in each province and territory except for the Northwest Territories. McInnis-Wharton submitted a piece titled Home, a tribute to her father. The piece is a five-foot-by-six-foot wall installation consisting of 15 flat slabs designed to look like chopped tree trunks.
"After three years away from home in Fredericton . I was starting to feel a little homesick," she said of why she created the piece. "I was starting to get really experimental with my work and was finding a lot of tree bark texture coming out in the pieces I was doing. I realized as I was working with these bits and pieces that they reminded me a lot of my dad."
She began mirroring her father's work style - methodic, with everything in order and as little mess as possible.
"He would scrape all the bark off wood before bringing it into the house to avoid the mess in the house," she recalled.
"Our woodstove is like our central gathering place, and he is the person who keeps that place warm for us to come to."
Winning the award came as a delight. McInnis-Wharton recalls the college's dean, director and administration tracking her down in her studio to let her know she'd won.
"They were really excited. (They) came and found me . and jumped up and down with me when I won, which was really cute," she said. Winning the award on behalf of the institution where she felt like a member one big family was particularly meaningful to her.
The other reason she appreciated the achievement is that the piece is a connection tying her life together. While in Fredericton, she found herself finding places her father had told her about as a child, from the time when he had grown up in New Brunswick. The award, she said, felt like a dual win for New Brunswick and the Northwest Territories.
"It was a nice tying-together of two of my favourite places - my school and my home," she said.
McInnis-Wharton's pottery style uses an alternative firing technique. Instead of using a standard electric kiln, her work is raku-fired.
Raku-firing involves building a kiln out of bricks or converting an old electric kiln into one fired with propane.
Once the pottery reaches a temperature between 900 and 1,050 C, they are removed and placed in metal bins lined with sawdust, newspapers and other combustible materials.
"As soon as you put them in, they ignite everything in the bin. When you put the lid on that bin, the atmosphere becomes starved of oxygen, so the flames basically start looking for things to pull out of the pot as a substitute," McInnis-Wharton said. "You don't always know what you're going to get. The colours and textures can be very different, and a lot of times you can actually see the flame patterns in (the pottery)."
As the New Brunswick winner of the art competition, McInnis-Wharton will receive a $5,000 prize and a trip to Toronto for the opening of the 1st Art! 2016 exhibition in November.
