Saskatoon artist, Paula Cooley, talked inspiration and her path to sculpting at the open reception for Mix at the Humboldt and District Gallery on Apr. 7.
A collection of her work is now on display at the Gallery which started Apr. 1 and will run until Jun. 18. The Bart Pragnell show, Inspired Movement, is on loan from the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery and is on tour through the
Organization of Saskatchewan Art Councils and sponsored by Conexus.
Cooley takes a lot of her inspiration from nature, although she does not do literal representations but works with an idea that comes into her head.
“The starting points in nature may not tell where the end is going to come from,” says Cooley.
Cooley gave herself a challenge when starting her collection. Each piece had to have one piece of clay in it but she also wanted to incorporate another type of material into the piece, whether it be wire, metal, or glass.
“So I’d start off with a piece about clay and think about how can I get a different material into it.”
New pieces spawned from working this way since working one material into one piece may give her inspiration for how she could use it in another one, says Cooley.
One of Cooley’s pieces includes a wire and clay with plastic drink rings lining a wave.
This one was inspired by the ocean and plastic waste that people throw into the ocean that gets washed up onto the shore.
Cooley is a pottery trade so she wants people to see the versatility of clay.
Cooley’s collection includes three panelled welded frames with close to 200 porcelain tubes layered inside. This is one of Cooley’s favourite pieces she said since this was her most difficult piece to create.
The piece was also a huge amount of work and a leap of faith, says Cooley, who did not see the piece together until it was installed in the Gallery.
“I kept hoping that it would look good and it did,” Cooley says happily.
The bottoms of each tube are thin enough for light to shine through and has lace patterns worked into the porcelain.
She was trying to immigrate light moving through lace curtains and was reminded of her grandmother’s lace curtains, she says.
Some of the lace that Cooley used was actually her grandmother’s table cloth.
Next on the agenda for Cooley is taking some of the pieces in her current collection and taking them further. Cooley has some of her Prickle pieces; the sculptures in the gallery that sit on the floor and look like a bush with fruit, at home that still needs to be worked on, she says.
