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October 2011 Newsletter

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!

August 13, 2011: 2011 Annual Art Auction, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado www.andersonranch.org

May of 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

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November 2019 Newsletter

Indigo Street Studio Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It’s part of our website indigostreetpottery.com, which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, and garden.

Indigo Street Studio Calendar

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In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Studio Calendar

2. 2019 Indigo Street Studio Holiday Open Studio

3. Alaska and Vancouver, British Columbia

4. Studio Visit with Celia and Keith Rice-Jones, Burnaby, Canada

5. Indigo Street Studio Native Landscaping

December 7-8 & 14-15, 2019: Indigo Street Studio 2019 Holiday Open Studio, both Saturdays 10am- 4pm, both Sundays 12pm - 4pm, at our home studio Indigo Street Studio

Roadside U.S.A.

i.d.e.a. Museum, Mesa, Arizona

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Alaska and Vancouver, B.C.

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Celia and Keith share a large, indoor gas car kiln and common studio work space.

Farraday Newsome,Twilight, Night, and Dawn, glazed terra cotta lidded jars, each approx. 8 x 8 x 8”, 2019

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Studio Visit with Celia and Keith Rice-Jones

Burnaby, British Columbia

2019 Indigo Street Studio

Holiday Open Studio

This year’s 2019 Indigo Street Studio Holiday Event will be the first two full weekends in December:

Saturday, December 7 10am - 4pm

Sunday, December 8 12pm-4pm

Saturday, December 14 10am - 4pm

Sunday, December 15 12pm - 4pm

Where: 6931 E. Indigo St., Mesa AZ 85207 For driving directions, click here!

We set up our Holiday Event in our studio workspace and showroom. We hope you can come by to enjoy the art, native landscaping, kitchen garden, hot coffee, and snacks!

We will have beautiful work in a wide price range, with items from $35 on up to collector level. We are delighted that you make time to visit and give us a chance to catch up with how you’ve been this past year!

We will have new birds-on-a-wire! These popular items are glazed terra cotta birds epoxied to solid copper wire & meant for the yard, a planter, or where ever you dream up! $35 each.

There will also be plenty of cups to choose from!

Here are a couple of set-ups and work from our past holiday open studios. In addition to using our showroom for the event, we put cloths over our studio work tables and transform our work area into display space. There will be a large selection of various-sized plates, bowls, cups, tiles, small and large sculptures. We hope you can come by and check it all out!

While we were in the Vancouver area we visited husband and wife ceramic artists Celia and Keith Rice-Jones in their lovely home studio in Burnaby, British Columbia. Together they run Wildrice Studio . Jeff met these two more than twenty years ago while he was in Burnaby as part of a Mesa, AZ - Burnaby, B.C. sister city event at Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre for the Arts.

Link to a video tour of Wildrice Studio:

A Life in the Day: 25 Years On

Link to a video of Celia and Keith at work in their Burnaby studio:

Working The Edge

Keith Rice-Jones is a ceramic sculptor. A number his pieces were displayed throughout the couple’s beautiful gardens. On their website Wildrice Studio Keith writes,

While early training in England as a woodwork teacher was rooted in the Arts and Crafts tradition, the Bauhaus and modernist ideas became a huge influence. I discovered clay in the early 70s and it continues to be a compulsion and ongoing journey of discovery.

The design heritage and way of working resonates in my work but there are also hints of a fascination with different cultures and ideas of ritual.

Earlier work with stylized functional vessels and containers continues, though my current focus is with large sculptural work.

Celia Rice-Jones is a studio potter, focusing on making bowls, cups, jars, plates and serving dishes. Her work, like Keith’s, is high fire. On their website Wildrice Studio Celia writes,

My initial art school training in England was within the Leach,Cardew, Davis traditions. I taught Art and Ceramics at Secondary and Tertiary levels and later took time out to raise a family. By the time I returned to teaching I had my own studio and was involved in developing my own work. In 1988 I moved to Vancouver, set up a studio with my husband Keith and work there full time.

There is a naturally established circular completeness to my lifestyle. I can make bread in the kitchen, tend to the garden on the way to the studio, and make pots to use with food. I enjoy this revolving cycle of activities, each including the others, and all contained behind tall laurel hedges in an urban environment that blends West Coast heritage, Japanese formality and English profusion.

In the world of potters, there are mud workers, chemists and firemen. I fit comfortably into the first category, being concerned with how much I can push clay around in its plastic state. My aim is for each piece I make to have a presence of its own, to invite being picked up and handled, and to stand quietly while waiting for use. My love is for a generous form which retains evidence of its making through all the processes and stage, which invites and includes the user, and adds to the richness of the domestic routine.

As a final note of beauty, the home’s various gardens include a lovingly tended kitchen garden. Kale, leeks, chard, herbs, raspberries, tomatoes, lettuce, and more thrive in the Pacific Northwest climate.

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Indigo Street Studio Native Landscaping

We are now home in our Sonoran desert climate, so very different from that of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska! After a late monsoon rain our beloved Leucophyllum frutescens “White Cloud” burst into bloom, as well as the yellow flowering Senna wislizeni to the left. To the right is a Senita Cactus (Pachycereus schottii). The tree behind is a Blue Palo Verde Parkinsonia florida, and towering over all is the giant Saguaro Carnegiea gigantea.

We recently took a trip to the Pacific Northwest that included Washington’s Olympic National Forest, Vancouver, B.C., and southeast Alaska. What a beautiful escape from the desert heat!

While we were in Vancouver, Canada we visited the University of British Columbia’s Botanical Garden, the oldest university garden in Canada. We especially enjoyed the Redwood Canopy walk, a suspended bridge that traversed a good-sized area of redwood and cedar forest, swaying and bouncing with every step.

Left photo: Canopy walk entrance.

Right photo: Jeff negotiating one of the many spans.

The suspended structure is attached to forest tree trunks by ingenious engineering reminiscent of a small fish trap that when one puts a finger inside and then attempts to pull it out, the trap tightens on the finger. In this case, the attachment mechanism surrounding the trunk tightens with the weight of visitors. There is no girdling or trunk penetration that might injure the tree. The hanging walk had plenty of sections and took a while to complete! Very memorable and fun.

While we were in southeast Alaska we walked in the Tongass National Forest, our nation’s largest national forest. This temperate rainforest gets an average 110” of rain annually! The mossy forest floors were spectacular, as were the large masses of a variety of mushrooms, including the beautiful red-and-white fly agaric Amanita muscaria, above, hallucinogenic and potentially poisonous.

The highlight of our trip was the day we spent in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve. This large bay is surrounded by mountains and has seven tidewater glaciers (glaciers that flow into seawater). With autumn descending, the bay’s water was strewn with floating pieces of sea ice.

Five of the seven glaciers in Glacier Bay are retreating, but the profoundly beautiful Margerie Glacier, photo above, is currently stable.

The John Hopkins Glacier, photo above, is also in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. This glacier, the seventh, is twelve miles long and is a rare example of a glacier that is advancing rather than retreating.

In Skagway, Alaska we went to an Iditarod athlete-dog training "summer camp". It’s a place where competitive mushing dogs train for the coming winter Iditarod season. A big part of their training is hauling tourists like us through the Tongass rainforest on "sleds" with wheels. The dogs were very eager to pull and work! When they saw us coming they were barking and pulling with excitement & their high spirits were very infectious! None of them were the purebred Huskies I'd imagined with blue eyes, curling tails, and full coats. We learned that purebreds like that are show dogs. Working musher dogs training for the Iditarod are always part husky (by rules), but are bred with a variety of other breeds to give optimal, strength, temperament, smarts, and a desire to work.

Jeff Reich, Althorn Cube, stoneware, 10 x 10 x 10”, 2019

Jeff Reich, Allthorn, 14 x 12 x 3”, stoneware, 2019, wired to hang

New glazed terra cotta work by Farraday Newsome: Poppy Bowl, 2.5 x 7.5 x 7.5”; Poppy Plate, 1 x 9 x 9”, wired to hang; Poppy Jar, 3.5 x 4.75 x 4.75”.

SAVE THE DATE!