Category Archives: articles

The Place of Objects

Written In Clay

2025 Essay, “A Home for Objects”, Written In Clay, 2025
In 2024, editors Stephanie Rebick and Michael Prokopow of “The Place of Objects, the John David Lawrence Collection” catalogue for Written In Clay, the 2025 exhibition at Vancouver Art Gallery, invited colleagues of John Lawrence to write about what interested them in his collection. I chose to write about how his mindful practice of collection has provided and protected invaluable information in identifying BC ceramicists and their work, and laid the foundation for the BC Ceramic Mark Registry.
Hosted by the Craft Council of BC

Ceramics Now 2025

Collectors and Collections, Ceramics Return to the Vancouver Art Gallery

2025 Collectors and Collections, Ceramics Return to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ceramics Now Magazine, Romania, Nov. 2025.
John Lawrence’s maverick immersion into the cultural ecosystem of his neighbourhood and his city contributes enormously to a greater appreciation of what the material arts tell us about ourselves and our history. His dedication to learning about the ceramics of British Columbia has infected others and through the acts of collection, and of knowledge-gathering, Lawrence has initiated what we hope will be an amendment in the status and situation of the ceramic and material arts of British Columbia.
Available at Ceramics Now Magazine

Article and Books page

Bill Rennie – His Realms and Havens

2025 Author, Bill Rennie – His Realms and Havens, Architectural Marvels in Clay, Sassamatt Publishing.
Bill Rennie was a Vancouver based artist/ Activist whose practice spanned from 1976 until his death in 2015. He was a multifaceted character whose elaborate ceramic architectural constructs speak both to his aesthetic ad his activist objectives. He was a defender of the arts and a voluble and effective advocate for gender rights. His social contributions and his remarkable architectural sculptures remain unsung. This book is intended to share his story across Canada and beyond.
Available on Amazon

Article and Books page

Enduring and Enigmatic, The Work of Thomas Kakinuma

2025 Author, Enduring and Enigmatic, The Work of Thomas Kakinuma, Sassamatt Publishing.
Thomas Kakinuma’s story runs parallel to the mayhem of global events unfolding the tumultuous 20th Century. He arrived in Vancouver in 1937 at the onset of the Sino-Japanese war. As WWII broke out, he moved across the continent to attend art colleges in Toronto, then New York, and, with the advent of McCarthyism, he returned to Vancouver in 1950. From that time his humanistic and assessable ceramic practice has remained in the public and the curatorial lines of vision.
Available on Amazon

New Ceramics 2021

2020 “Imaging and Imagining the Inheritance of Colonialism, the work of Heidi Mackenzie”, New Ceramics Magazine, Germany, 2021.
Heidi McKenzie invited me to write an article about her familial photographs on ceramic forms, identifying the systemic racism and colonial attitudes around immigration that her family first encountered in the Caribbean and then in Canada.
New Ceramics, June 2021

The Art of Thomas Kakinuma

2018 “The Art of Thomas Kakinuma”, catalogue.
Essays by myself, Dr. Carol E. Mayer, Allan Collier and Stephanie Renaud. Photographed by the late Ken Mayer.
Curators Kiriko Watanabe and the late Darrin Morrison of the West Vancouver Museum were alerted to the Kakinuma article, knew of several collectors, and facilitated a large retrospective of Kakinuma’s work in January 2018. The first showing of his work since 1969 at the VAG.

2nd Edition, Up on the Roof

The Role of Equestrian Ridge Tiles as Historical Narrative, by Debra Sloan and Peter Smith.
Up on the Roof explores traditional equestrian clay ridge tiles that from the middle ages adorned rooflines in Britain and Europe. The practice died out by the early 1800s in the UK and now those last and rare remnants are found mainly in West Country museums. Up on the Roof recounts how Bernard Leach and fellow members of the Old Cornwall Society revived the rendition in the 1920s. love the last decades memories faded once again, until, in 2014, the Leach Pottery instigated research and response. The effect of the tiles, architectural adornment, clarifies the role of art in the public realm, where it install interaction and engage