Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des Arts du Canada celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Saidye Bronfman Award. We are thrilled that Pamela Ritchie has received the honour this year. And we celebrate L. A. Pai Gallery artists who have received this honour in years past.
Ione Thorkelsson is one of Canada's most recognized glass artists. Winner of the 2010 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts/Saidye Bronfman Award, Ione has spent a lifetime exploring glass sculpture.Operating a one-woman studio for nearly forty years in relative isolation has forced her to be technically innovative. As a consequence, she has acquired through time a formidable knowledge of all aspects of operating a glass studio. By 1993 she began working with various casting techniques, thus marking the outset of a migration from blown work to sculptural cast work that was more or less complete by 2005.
View the Canada Council video below:
To view more work by this artist, click here: https://www.lapaigallery.com/collections/ione-thorkelsson
About the Artist:
Ione’s career in glass began in 1973 when she set up her studio in a renovated chicken coop in Manitoba. Her initial aspiration was simply to make a living as best she could creating functional pieces in this exciting new artform. At that time she was heavily influenced by the ethos of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century.
Operating a one-woman studio for nearly forty years in relative isolation has forced her to be technically innovative. As a consequence, she has acquired through time a formidable knowledge of all aspects of operating a glass studio. By 1993 she began working with various casting techniques, thus marking the outset of a migration from blown work to sculptural cast work that was more or less complete by 2005.
Concurrent with this professional migration was the internal migration that resulted from her discovery of the expressive possibilities of this new medium. The artistic accomplishments of the many major solo shows she has mounted of her cast work are a far cry from the modest Arts and Crafts ethos of the early days of the contemporary craft movement in North America. This later work tends to be based on forms found in nature and is often marked by incongruity.
