Emilie Grace Lavoie was interviewed by Mark Kilfoil on CHSR's (97.9FM) program "The Lunchbox," on July 18th, 2018.
MK: Good morning Emilie, it’s great to see you here. EG: Good morning, thank you. MK: Bit of a damp morning here. We are in the casemates once again and I’m going to take a guess and say you’re making bread, because I see a huge roller in front of me, and am I wrong? EG: You are, yes. (laughs) MK: What is it you do down here? EG: I do ceramic sculptures. So the process is still related to cooking, the process involves using kilns and how to prepare the clay. MK: Okay, so I wasn’t too far off, although I don’t usually note any rolling pin with a lot of sculptures. I see you have a wheel here and a lot of other carving tools; that’s what I normally think of with a sculpture. So describe what your kind of sculpture is. EG: Well, it’s sort of organic forms. Right now I’m experimenting with textiles so I use textile in the ceramic slip which is a liquid ceramic. So when the textile dries, it becomes harder with the clay on top, and then when it goes into the bisque fire, which is a low temperature fire, fabric will disappear and only the shell of the fabric will remain, so it’s kind of transforming fabric into ceramic. MK: If you were here, you’d see in front of us here, I feel like I’m looking at a black and white version of Under The Sea. Is that what you’re going for here? EG: Well, I am interested in the ecological crisis, and the climate change, and the unknown impact of human activity on the other living species’, and also artists’ connection with the natural world, and also that we share the same ecology. But sometimes we don’t think about all the other organisms, and so I’m just trying to imagine a way to create other types of species or living creatures that would take over the land, and so it is inspired by ocean life, or just like bacteria, something strange. Because I feel like often we don’t recognize something from our land, then we associate it with either ocean life or something from outer space. MK: Yeah, there’s something very alien about a lot of these pieces, and when I see an underwater vista, people might think “oh, fish,” or maybe the familiar-looking seaweed, but this looks a lot more like the stuff that would be growing underneath the water in those strange formations and sponges and things like that. Is this a kind of subject you’ve tackled before, or is it something you’re specifically doing for this week? EG: Well, it is something I work with usually, but for this week I was trying to imagine just a way that those unknown creatures would adapt to our life, and also I want to do some tests during the week, like go to the river and find some <indistinct> or some <indistinct> object or something that I could integrate into my sculpture as well, because this is something I want to investigate as well using the clay from nearby environments. MK: So get a bit of local character in that. Is river clay suitable for sculpture? I mean, you’re using a special kind of pottery clay I would assume. EG: Yes. Well, I never did some tests, but someone told me, for instance, that the Petitcodiac in Moncton, the Chocolate River, it’s suitable for that. Like when it’s more red, the texture of the clay, and it’s a low fire, so again I would need to do some tests to see which fire would work. I don’t know, I just want to experiment. MK: Is that what this week is for for you? Is experimentation? Or is it honing another part of your craft? EG: Well, a bit of both I would say. Trying to get inspired off the ambiance here will influence my work and practice, and it’s kind of strange in a way to be doing ceramic here when I see outside and there’s people coming in. I feel like looking at my pieces like “I almost don’t recognize them,” because it’s a different to be creating, so I’m not sure. Anyways, to be out of the comfort zone, and to just challenge that. MK: And are people wandering around, right into the middle of your process must be asking questions, and be kind of curious. EG: Yes, they do ask questions, and some of them are curious and I give them a little piece of clay so they can add to my piece and they can try as well. MK: Okay, so there’s a little leftover of that audience coming in and making that permanent impact. So let’s talk a little about your process. You’ve outlined it here, what kind of cloth is this? EG: This is natural cotton, as well for the knitting part, this is natural cotton as well. MK: Okay, so do you start essentially as a tailor or a seamstress building a cloth version of what you’re going to make? Or is it more you’re building elements that will be coming out through the sculpture? EG: More elements. The way I work, I’ll be preparing my clay to make sure it’s at a good consistency, to make sure it stays when I build a piece, so I’ll be building a piece, and then I’ll add the details on top. I don’t usually do drawings or anything before I just do. And when it comes to the fabric part, I do prepare some pieces, like some little ruffles, and I do some knitting as well, and then here, I’ll just show you. This the slip, so then when I’m making the piece and I have the fabric piece, well I’ll just put the fabric piece into the slip. MK: Okay, so you’re soaking it and not just covering it. EG: Yes, soaking it, to make sure that every parts do have clay on them, and then I’ll add it to the ceramic piece. MK: So this liquid clay, is it light enough? I would think the fabric would just fold under the weight, because I think of clay as quite heavy. EG: Well, I need to let it dry a bit, and then it’s good to go, because those are not like big fabric pieces, so it would be able to stand like this, like I’d just need to <indistinct> my hands, but when it’s a bigger piece like if we look over here, like those I need them to dry just a bit so it can maintain its form. MK: Now you’re working with, well I can’t say pottery, these aren’t pots. Clay? EG: Nope, it’s a ceramic sculpture. MK: I guess when I think of statuary, that’s when you’re taking away material, you’re adding material, constantly adding on top. Are these built in layers? Is that how that works or is it several components that come together? Because I see some pretty complicated things here, and I’m just trying to imagine how they get put together. EG: Well, when I’m done building my overall form, I just prepare some small elements on the side, and then I do an accumulation of those elements, and then I just add it to the overall piece. MK: So the ones we see here, there’s about eight or nine different pieces, what stage are these at? EG: They’re drying right now. MK: So did you put these together just yesterday then? EG: On Monday and yesterday, yeah. So now they’re drying, and after they dry, it takes at least a week to be completely dry, and then once it’s dry dry, then we do what we call a bisque, which is a low temperature fire, just to make sure that the clay becomes harder, and then gets ready for a glaze, and then after that step I’ll prepare my glaze recipes, and then I’ll glaze them, and then I’ll do a high-fire temperature, which is like a higher temperature, and then the glaze will react with the clay, and they heat in the kiln, and then that’s when you get the colours and effects and texture. MK: So when you say high and low temperatures, how would you relate that to, say, baking? Is this a 350-degree-for-several-hours versus 500-for-ten-minutes or? EG: Well, my ceramic teacher always told us it was the same temperature as a volcano. MK: Wow! That’s considerably warmer then. And that’s the high temperature one? And a low temperature one is? EG: I would say 1000 degrees celsius. MK: Okay, so they’re all relatively high. So it’s been kind of rainy these last couple of days, is that going to make everything slow down in terms of drying or does that make any difference really? EG: No, everything is not drying as fast because it’s so humid, so I’ve been putting a fan in front of it. Some of them I see are already dry or almost, but some of them are not dry at all, and I was done with them on Monday, so it’s okay because they need to dry slow because if they dry too fast, it can create some cracks. MK: Yeah, I was gonna ask why you didn’t put them straight in the oven, because I would think the oven would dry them out. EG: Well you can do what we call a preheat, but it’s preferable to have them dry slow because we never know what can happen in the kiln. It can explode or crack. MK: That’s got to be a really sad moment when you put all this work into it, you’ve waited a week for the thing to dry out, you put it in the kiln, and are you chewing your fingernails at that point or are you kind of, at this point, used to that potential crack or explosion? EG: Well, I’m okay with it. So far I haven’t had too much cracking or anything, because you need to know the process too. It’s always with the glaze, you never know how it might react. MK: I wanted to ask you about that, because when you’re doing the glaze, how much control do you have over the colour, if any? EG: Well, you do some tests before. You put some oxides or carbonated elements in there, and when you do some tests, you should be safe, but there’s always some chance that you put something with something with red iron oxide next to it, and it might react in the kiln, just like from being in the same environment. So you don’t really have control, but it’s always the fun part. MK: So that’s the fun surprise? So how long is it in that part of the process? EG: It’s the last step, so it’s an hour fire. MK: Okay, so it’s still a find-out-tomorrow kind of thing. So what patterns form? Is it something you can control, that you can place your material in certain places to produce certain colours or is it more of a coating that simply transforms when it gets to the heat? EG: It’s a coating, because it’s a recipe with elements, so like silica, some <indistinct>, and some powder, like this. And at the end, let’s say I glaze a piece and it’s all red, well when it comes out of the kiln, it might be blue. It’s never what you expect. You can use some underglaze, which are some more commercial colours, so what you put there is what you’ll see at the end. But I prefer using my own recipes and playing with this chance aspect. MK: Again, all the control up to that very point, but then you start to move your hands back and say “okay, do what you’re going to do.” Does that make the artwork come alive for you again in a way? Because you’ve lived with it for a considerable amount of time by then. EG: Well, I made a piece back in Vancouver when I was studying, and it was like the biggest piece I ever built in just one section, and at the last fire, it collapsed. But at the end, when we got it out of the kiln, it was like a happy accident, because at the end it felt like “well, my piece is alive, because it took its own entity” kind of thing. So I felt like this was a really exciting moment for me to let go of the control as well, because there’s only so much control you can have, and so it really felt like this object became its own thing. MK: So how long have you been doing this kind of process? EG: Since 2013, was when I started my first ceramic class. And then this was my medium to work with, first I do sculptures, but with other materials. But ceramic is my favourite material. MK: So what about ceramics do you think drew you in? Was it the intricacy you can make with these patterns or was it just something about the way it feels when you’re working with them? What do you think was the appeal? EG: I think it was the whole process. It’s something you need to be invested in, and something you need to be very well-organized, you cannot be working at the last minute, because there’s so many steps to creating this piece, and also at the end you have this final product. And that’s the exciting part, I feel like there’s no other medium like that, I love it. MK: So you’re down here in the casemates, obviously a part of this is somewhat portable, but you’re not gonna have a portable kiln. Are you using the kilns here at NBCCD or do you have on at home? EG: Well, right now, for the summer, June and July, I’m the Artist in Residency at Universite de Moncton, so that’s where I’ll be firing those pieces. MK: So you’ll be driving with these all the way back in the back of the car, very carefully spread out I suspect. Are they delicate at this stage? I guess they’re still drying too. EG: Yes, when they’re dry like this, you just look at them and they might crack. So I’ll be very careful. But at the same time, if there’s a little piece that breaks, the glaze is not yet there, so the glaze will cover this accident. MK: And is that another one of the happy accidents or organic nature of the sculptures? EG: Yes. MK: So besides the sort of sea floor pieces that we have here, what other kind of pieces do you work on? EG: Well, I started exploring using fabric, and not just textile. I don’t know if you can see the second picture there on the left. MK: I don’t know how to describe that, what’s your description of that? EG: Just some strange creature. MK: It’s vaguely humanoid shape, I can kind of make out two legs on the bottom, or am I looking at the right one? EG: The black and white there. Those are only textile, this is ceramic. MK: Okay, yeah you’ve got a similar one beside it, I wasn’t sure. Now is that something you’re trying to particularly evoke, like a humanoid shape? EG: This was when I finished my Bachelor’s Degree, I made this piece. If you see the piece on top there, it’s like molded hands, and there’s the strings attached to the chandelier, and then this human figure is just like how the impact of the textile industry and fashion industries, how they exploit the labour of all the women’s working. And then the pollution, how the dyes and everything go into the water and affects ocean life. So it’s just a critique on that. And this one, I was at the Francophonie Games last summer in Africa, and this got me a silver medal. MK: That’s amazing! So what about fabrics is attractive to you? EG: Well, I do have a degree in fashion design, that’s where I studied first, in that field. It’s the hands-on, working with that material, that attracted me at first. And now that I feel like doing ceramic, it’s all the same. You need to be working with your hands, and I’m just trying to merge my two interests together. MK: Fashion design really feels like a far distance away from sculptures, but do you see that there’s a sort of continuity there? EG: There is. When you think about garments in general, they’re also kind of like a soft sculpture that people are wearing, and if you look at, for instance, Alexander McQueen, or some of those designers that are creating those more structured silhouettes. MK: Sort of why they call out haute coutoure kind of “not really meant to be walked down main street” kind of thing? EG: Exactly. Also it can be between design or art. MK: I can kind of see it especially in the sculptures you have here. Because these would be things that would be in the water, typically, and they would be moving, slightly, with the water. Kind of like fabric moving in the wind. So you’ve got this amazing collection, and people aren’t necessarily going to see the finished product here, unfortunately, because you’ll have to take them all the way back to Moncton to get them fired. Is there a place online people can follow your work and take a look at this stuff and see where it might lead to? EG: Yes, I do have a website. It’s temporarily out of service because I just transferred from one website to another, but it should be running pretty soon. So it’s emiliegracelavoie.com, and that’s where I update my new work. MK: Now you’ve already nine pieces here. How many do you think you’ll have done by the end of the week? Are you looking to triple or quadruple this or is it refinement that you want to do now? EG: I don’t know, I set myself some goal to be productive, like at least three or four pieces a day, but I take it as it goes. And I want to take some time as well to go find objects. I don’t want to put a number, at this point I’m having fun. MK: Well these are amazing pieces and the photos you’re showing me are really cool. One of the things I find fascinating is that there is an immediate impact to sculptures to a lot of art, but then there’s the deeper meaning. Do you feel that people get the deeper meaning or do you have to provide them the context to understand what they’re looking at, or does that even matter? EG: Well, I think people will make their own interpretation of the work, but I feel like it’s easier when it’s in a gallery setting for people to feel the experience of the pieces. So play with the space and how those pieces will impact them, kind of. My ultimate goal is to get people to question themselves about their relationship with the nearby ecology and environment, and really to think about their personal impact. MK: And not take it for granted maybe. EG: Exactly, because the thing is, we are all in the same boat. What we’re doing to the environment is what we’re doing to us, so if we’re destroying it, we’re destroying ourselves. MK: Well that’s a pretty good impact I think they’re going to have. Thank you, Emilie, for talking to me today. EG: Thank you so much. Listen to the full interview here.
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