In March 2019, I was included in an article for the Toronto Star featuring five women ceramic artists from the Toronto area to help highlight women in the arts.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
Naomi Clement is a Canadian potter who creates conceptual but functional ceramics and tableware. She is the recipient of Craft Ontario’s 2018 Craft Award for Bound, a collection of hand built stoneware with graphic elements made from old family correspondence and ephemera, which are used in her decorative process. The ephemera is scanned and laser-cut in newsprint and then applied to the stoneware objects when they are still leather hard (a term used to describe clay before it’s completely dried out and before it is put it in a kiln, when it still has moisture in it). She uses under glazes to adhere the ephemera to the clay which she says have some clay content in them so they attach to the clay — it acts as a glue to stick the paper to the clay. Clement says she likes the depth of surface that is created with the treatment. “Some of the ephemera that I’ve scanned comes from old family recipes from the women in my family, and also baby book entries, just sort of those quiet, domestic labours of women … a quiet labour that often goes unnoticed.”
Clement discovered her love of clay while a student at an arts-based high school in London, Ontario. She attended NSCAD University in Halifax where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. “NSCAD showed me that ceramics could be an amazing vehicle for content and ideas and not just as objects,” says Clement, who went on to do a residency at Medalta in Medicine Hat, AB for a year before attending graduate school at Louisiana State University. She is currently living and creating in Northern Ontario. Her work is currently on exhibit at The Companion Gallery in Humboldt Tennessee and will be available on an ongoing basis beginning later this spring at Shane Norrie Contemporary Gallery in Stratford, Ontario. She is also participating in the Ash + Barrel Invitational Ceramic Exhibition, an invitational exhibition of 13 different ceramic artists taking place May 3-5 at the Amsterdam Brewery in Toronto.
