Wendy Walgate

TORONTO-BASED CERAMIC ARTIST

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• Wendy Walgate

  I am a ceramic artist working in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. For over 25 years, clay has been my medium and through the years, I have moved through functional work to sculptural pieces.

  
  

  My current work examines and comments upon our culture of acquisition, accumulation and display. The consequences of this strong compulsion to acquire, accumulate and hoard are now all too evident in the world we see around us. The history of production ceramics is crowded with romanticized or idealized human figurines and anthropomorphized animals made specifically for the everyday collector and the connoisseur.

  
  

  Ceramic mementoes adorn countless fireplace mantles, china cabinets, display shelves and store windows. Often these objects carry surprisingly strong emotive meanings and associations. There seems to be a human need to harden and parcel out this emotional value, usually referencing lost innocence or nostalgic longing.

  
  

  At first glance, my collections appear light-hearted and even whimsical. There are childishly big-eyed dogs and cats. They are Disneyfied pigs, cows and chickens. These animal “objects” are housed in familiar containers such as old suitcases, boxes, and wagons all suggesting movement and confinement.

  
  

  Mounded together, having imposed upon them an improbable upward climb over and on top of each other, the animal “objects” settle into a precarious harmony. The use of commercial, ready-made molds to create identical animals over and over again signifies mass production, genetic replication and loss of identity.

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