https://www.comoxvalleyartgallery.com

CVAG Community Make Art Series – Summer 2022 – Project IV

August 24 2022 / 2:00pm - August 31 2022 / 4:30pm

MAP: Make / Art / Place – An Interest in Place

JOIN US at CVAG plaza on Wednesdays for make art projects led by artists, students, interns, and community collaborators – Wachiay Studio and MakeItZone.

Free / Public

Most weeks are drop-in. Registration is required for Project IV, as space is limited.
Please email gallery5@comoxvalleyartgallery.com to register.


PROJECT IV – CERAMICS AT HOME: BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO HAND-BUILDING POTTERY
Facilitated by Ella Downing
2 – 4:30PM on Wednesdays, August 24 + 31 at CVAG Plaza

Part A: 2 – 4:30PM, August 24 – Learning the techniques + hand building with clay

Part B: 2 – 4:30PM, August 31 – Painting and decorating

Participants are required to sign up for both sessions.
Children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult.


If you are curious about what pottery is all about, or just interested in making something beautiful, then this class is for you! Join Ella from Lentil Kitchen Ceramics for a 2-part series of hand-building pottery using air dry clay.

Paired with hand-building, air dry clay is a fabulous introduction to the world of ceramics. No potter’s wheel or kiln required!

Participants will learn how to use the pinch pot technique to create a bowl, jewellery holder, or any other decorative piece you could want in your home! All supplies are provided.

At the end of this series, students will have the skills to further their hand-building at home, and each student will leave with one hand-built ceramic piece.

Please note: since air dry clay is not fired in a kiln, food safe glaze cannot be used on them. Participants will be making decorative pieces that are not food safe or waterproof.


Ella Downing is the creative behind the brand Lentil Kitchen. All of her ceramic pieces are made solely by hand without the use of a potter’s wheel. Her favourite part of the process is glazing, when she can get creative!

Each Lentil Kitchen piece is created with the highest quality Canadian clay, hand-shaped, sponged, dried slowly, hand-painted, and bisque-fired. Bright, cheerful designs are essential to the making of Lentil Kitchen’s ceramics. Ella’s goal is to brighten someone’s space with just one of her pieces!

Lentil Kitchen’s ceramics are now available at SHOP:MADE.


CVAG Summer 2022 Community Make Art Series is an invitation to engage with the current gallery programming by explorations, observations, and conversations that are seen in the exhibition at the gallery from June 15 – September 10, 2022:
Marlene Creates: Works from Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2002–2021
Œuvres réalisées au chemin Blast Hole Pond, Terre-Neuve 2002–2021

MARLENE CREATES’ EVOLVING PROCESS over four decades of art practice has been one of going outside to be on the land and to encounter a place through physical experience – lying down, sleeping, interacting, ‘listening’ to the land and those who live there. Drawing on these encounters, the artist has structured images and words to communicate her experiences through photographs, hand drawn maps, tracings, text, and performative acts. In these ways, the artist offers an opportunity for “seeing” the places we find ourselves with a new perspective.

‘Underlying all my work has been an interest in place – not as a geographical location but as a process that involves memory, multiple narratives, ecology, language, and both scientific and vernacular knowledge.’


Facebook Album


MAP: Make / Art / Place explores perceptions of the places where we are through integrated research: exhibitions, creative residencies, community collaborations, and workshops. CVAG’S place-responsive programming continues to emerge and take shape through relationships over time, including:

Public Space: Sacred Place (CVAG Plaza): Crossroads / Traditional Indigenous Full Circle Tea Garden / Traditional Welcome Poles / Place Naming: Qwee-koos-ah-ool (Puntlege) and Me’łlun (K’ómoks)

North Island Hospital Public Art Project

MAP: Make / Art / Place (summer + fall convergent programs 2016)

Return to Water (spring convergent program 2022)


The Comox Valley Art Gallery is grateful to be present on the Unceded Territory of the K’ómoks First Nation.