NOTHING IS NEWER THAN TRADITION

EXHIBITORS

Lina Maria Avendano

With training in industrial design, Lina Maria Avendano engages in an approach to jewellery design that combines her cultural background in Colombia with a passion for Spanish literature and art. Her work incorporates new materials and processes that have an industrial edge, yet maintain a delicate representation of the natural world.

Andrée Chénier

Andrée Chénier’s jewellery makes use of both organic materials and cutting edge technology. Her work creates a juxtaposition between her subjects, which include natural materials like nests, eggs, and seeds, and the sharp aesthetic of 3D printed materials.

Naomi Clement

Naomi Clement explores ideas of home and belonging through her current body of ceramic work, which incorporates text from family correspondence as elements in her decorative process. Clement hopes to create moments of connection between the maker and the viewer through the power and intimacy relayed by the object.

Hannah Epstein

Hannah Epstein (AKA hanski) is a folk media artist working in the cross-section of textile (#fyberspace) and experimental games (#gamestallations). Epstein’s work reimagines ideas of authority and authorship through subversive and informal cultural practices which effectively blur the lines between outsider artist and the reified canon.

Agnes Xiaoyan Guan

Agnes Xiaoyan Guan’s passion for designing and making jewellery results in bodies of work that play with the intersection of geometric forms and colour. With a background in both art and metalsmithing, Guan’s work engages in the historical language of abstract forms and minimalism to produce a contemporary aesthetic of logic and practicality.

Hamilton Holmes

Hamilton Holmes is a furniture designer and builder based in Hamilton, Ontario. Holmes’ practice includes producing quality millwork, designing and building custom furniture, as well as manufacturing high-quality, small batch furniture. For Holmes, experimentation is the lifeblood of his practice and production is the means.

Joon Hee Kim

Joon Hee Kim’s work considers the relationship between life and death. Using funeral urns, reliquaries and church ephemera, Kim’s work is a reflection on preserving the burden of human relationships, behaviors, and emotions. Kim uses multi-layered casting to reassemble and renew familiar forms, thereby creating new visual languages to communicate issues of human existence and absence.

Brittany MacDougall

Brittany MacDougall is a furniture designer who aims to create dynamic relationships in her work that add visual interest, and does so by combining media such as fabric, metal, and color. Interested in negative space and asymmetry, MacDougall creates work that is both beautiful and functional.

Matthew McIntyre

Matthew McIntyre is a wood-based designer whose work aims to take a fresh look at construction while maintaining traditional woodworking techniques in order to create timeless pieces of work. Matthew believes that pieces have value because of the thought and time put into building them.

Fuzzy Mall

Fuzzy Mall is a self-taught artist and a full-time maker. His current project involves quilting portraits of strangers that he meets in Hamilton, who then introduce him to his next subject. Mall’s objective is to reinterpret fleeting imagery by slowing down and hand-working his content rather than engaging in the digital act of swiping it away with a finger.

Dani Ortman

Using a combination of computer software design and hand weaving on a 70-year old loom, Dani Ortman brings together traditional methods with an eclectic 21st century style. Taking inspiration from optical illusions, graphic patterns, and luxurious fibers, Ortman crafts textiles to create a visceral connection between the work and worker.

Sam Pedicelli

Sam Pedicelli works in a variety of craft-based media. Her work considers our relationships with those around us, human, object, or otherwise, by employing the aesthetic of the diorama through small-scale installation. The resulting figures illustrate strangely familiar scenes that view contemporary culture through both a cynical and comical lens.

Amanda Rataj

Primarily working in textiles and photography, Amanda Rataj’s work is grounded in practicality and an interest in material culture and experience. Her work aims to create a dialogue about the personal, material and conceptual value of everyday objects.

Denise Smith

Denise Smith draws her audience in with familiar forms, only to reveal deeper messages upon closer inspection. Extending from the narrative tradition of ceramic figurines, her unique process combines slip-cast elements with hand sculpted elements, and then finishes each landscape form with painted and layered underglazes.

Magali Thibault Gobeil

Magali Thibault Gobeil is driven by her desire to transform the field of contemporary jewelry. Her Wonka-esque work plays with shape, color, and texture to encourage curiosity about the touch, taste, and smell of each piece. Through her jewelry, Thibault Gobeil invites others to join her in a delightful imaginary world.

Marlene Zagdanski

Marlene Zagdanski returned to her ceramic practice after a long hiatus while she pursued a career in law.  Her ceramic sculptures tell intimate stories of human vulnerability and our relationship with nature. Her recent work looks at love, loss, and landscape in the context of her family’s immigration story.

JURORS

Rachel Wong

Rachel Wong is an internationally renowned glass artist who lives and works in Toronto. Originally from Alberta, Wong received her BFA in glass from the Alberta College of Art and Design before going on to receive her MFA in sculpture at Alfred University.

David Kaye

David Kaye holds an AOCA from the Ontario College of Art, a BA from the University of Guelph and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Kaye managed Prime Gallery in Toronto for 18 years, the Bau-Xi gallery for five years, and in 2006 opened his own gallery, David Kaye Gallery, which exhibits work from established and emerging artists.

Laura Kukkee

Laura Kukkee is currently Head of Ceramics at Sheridan College, and was previously Head of Ceramics at Northwest Missouri State University. Kukkee is an alumni of the Sheridan College school of Craft and Design, and earned her MFA from Kent State University in Ohio in 2004.