Award-Winning Potter Showcases Talents At Brooke Valley Spring Tour

May 22, 2013

Anne Chambers is living the dream. The potter, who has been creating functional clay work for close to three decades, recently relocated to Brooke Valley from Ottawa partly to live a country life but also because her craft demanded the move. “I always wanted to work with certain glazes but you need a gas-fired kiln to get the effects that I was after, and now that I am in the country I can do just that,” she said.

Chambers is a master crafts person and has numerous awards on display in her showroom, including one that she is most proud of, a life time achievement award from the Ontario Crafts Council, which acknowledges the quality of her work, her volunteerism in the craft community, and her teaching. These awards attest to the fact that she is not an artist who is comfortable resting on her laurels.

Chambers studied first in Alberta and later at Sheridan College in the early eighties and has been a full time potter ever since. Her work is primarily functional and wheel-thrown and is made with porcelain clay and glazed in a wide variety of glazes. She uses different surface techniques, sometime slips and sometimes multiple layers of sprayed glazes, which give her the various color effects and which give her palette more of the earth tones compared to the work she was doing before leaving Ottawa. For the tour she had for sale a wider range of functional table ware including bowls, mugs, goblets, serving dishes and much more, each of which come in a wide range of colors thanks to her masterful use of different glazes and multiple surface decoration techniques. One line of her functional work is glazed with a “very difficult to get”, deep copper red glaze that requires a gas firing as does her sleek, richly colored and edge breaking temoku glaze.

Chambers is not only well known for her functional work; she has also won awards for her non-functional pieces. “People know that I do a lot of functional work but I also wanted to show people that I can do non-functional work as well.”

She likes to enter more elaborate pieces in competitions and shows and these pieces are often created beginning with thrown sections which are then cut and altered. She calls these her “composite pots” since they combine wheel-thrown forms which are then altered and added to with hand-built sections. She said that these are the pots that most get her creative juices flowing. “When you have been making pots on the wheel for 30 years, you kind of get tired of making round pots so this is one way that I can shake up my work a bit.” These composite pieces I think are some of her best and they include small oval dessert dishes and larger oval-shaped serving platters.

Chambers also has some very unique flower vases that she sells with their own matching flower frogs, the latter part comprised of a wheel-thrown spherical form with elaborately cut out sections that serve to hold the flowers in place. She also had on display a line of raku work with a gorgeous, lustrous glaze that I have never seen before, and which she achieves by first covering the pots with a thin spray of iron before they are fired.

On the weekend, Chambers opened up her home and studio to two other artists who were also part of the tour. Anais Fritzlan designs and creates “Under the Weather” bags, a unique a line of highly functional and masterfully sewn utilitarian bags that include courier bags and purses and other cycling accessories all made from a wide variety of printed fabrics. September Scribailo was also one of Ann's guests on the tour. She is a painter who creates her work using her own mixed encaustic paints.

When Ann is not working on her own work she holds regular workshops and classes at her studio. For more information visit www.annechambers.ca