Artist’s Statement

Originally from Montreal, Quebec, Rachelle has made Vancouver her home since 1995. Having come from a multicultural and multilingual background, her first career was as a language teacher. After finishing a degree in Spanish and French, she went to Japan to gain teaching experience, where a one-year stay became a four-year odyssey.

The clay culture in Japan set her irrevocably on the ceramic path. After four years of part-time apprenticeship in Tokyo, Yokohama and Kitakyushu, she returned to Canada. She then continued her studies, first at the Sheridan College of Art and Design in Oakville, Ontario, and later at the Emily Carr School of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. Rachelle now works from her studio in East Vancouver.

She writes: "I use clay as a medium of expression because it best suits the haptic nature of life: experience and understanding through physical contact.

Having grown up in a suburb of Montreal, my very earliest memories of the natural world are of collecting tadpoles from ponds behind our house, of exploring the bit of wooded area not yet claimed for further development, and of tobogganing on the hillside of Mount Royal. But my first encounter with real wilderness was when I came to British Columbia in 1978. The monumental size of both the mountains and the ocean propelled my awareness away from the micro and into the macro.

When I began kayaking seven years ago, I discovered water as I had never known it before. Kayaking on the Pacific inspires me to think differently, opening time and space so that the physical experience of being alive is at once absolutely still and expansive - an oceanic pulse.

Every day that I kayak, I feel the massive rising and heaving of the Pacific and every night I sleep listening to the surf crashing rhythmically onto the shore. I experience the tactile and auditory aspects of the waves synesthetically - in a visual pattern of line; later this patterning is carved into surfaces of thrown porcelain. When I carve, the hypnotic essence of the ocean is with me."

Contact Information:

Rachelle Marie Chinnery
Hornby Island, BC
tel: 604.928. 5344
email: porcelain@rachellechinnery.ca
website: www.rachellechinnery.ca

Please call ahead for studio visit.

Work can be viewed at the following venues:

Portfolio Gallery of Contemporary Canadian Glass & Ceramics, 863 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC
Gallery of BC Ceramics, 1359 Cartwright Street, Granville Island, Vancouver, BC
Petroff Gallery, A Show of Hands, 1016 Eglington Avenue West, Toronto, ON, www.ashowofhands.com

Kiss My Heart, stoneware, coiled and altered with incised prose
42 in. x 40 in. x 28 in.

Seedling of Desire, stoneware, coiled and altered with incised prose
35 in. x 50 in. x 28 in.

Read My Night, stoneware, coiled and altered with incised prose
35 in. x 40 in. x 25 in.