Portico Gallery The Portico Gallery is sponsored by Kim Spencer McPhee Barristers Speaker: Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator and Deputy Director Audio Tour Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Gardiner! I’m Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, and I’m here to talk about the works in what we are now calling the Portico Gallery. We’re happy to inaugurate this area as a space for viewing artwork. It’s one of the ways that we are moving our operations outside for summer of 2021.

The works in the Portico Gallery focus on the idea of green space, one of the nine Pillars of Sustainability offered by our partners at No.9, an arts advocacy group. So how is green space reflected in these objects? Let’s start with the Krocus Coffee Set made by the Meissen Porcelain Factory around the year 1900. Its soft organic shapes carry the stylized ornament of a crocus flower, often seen as the first sign of spring.

This coffee set was designed and fabricated at the time that Art Nouveau, or New Art, swept across Europe. Art Nouveau is characterized by fluid lines and exaggerated proportions, like those you’re seeing here. This approach looked to the natural world for inspiration, and it developed in step with the garden city movement, which advocated for urban green spaces. Think of all the smaller parks around Toronto. These can be understood as the legacy of the garden city movement. Works like Krocus Coffee Set bring this verdant green feeling directly into the home.

The two bottle or vase forms nearby represent another vision of green space. These pieces use the material of clay itself to evoke the natural world, with their irregular forms and rough, brownish-grey surfaces. The two potters who made these vases, Wayne Ngan on Vancouver Island and Shōji Hamada in Mashiko, Japan, both worked in remote settings and sought to reflect their rural environs in their pots. Both potters were widely celebrated in their lifetimes, often representing a pastoral ideal to their urban acolytes.

On the other side of the gallery, we see a herd of cattle grazing through a cup. This work was made by Joe Fafard, a ceramic artist who incorporated imagery from in and around his hometown of Regina. Fafard was part of a ceramic scene in Saskatchewan, especially active in the 1960s and 1970s, known for making narrative, funny, and often very odd work featuring animals, plants, and scenery from the prairies. For Fafard, green space was actually the core subject of his work.

Finally, we have a plate by British artist Paul Scott. In this work, Scott has adopted the industrial approach of printing on ceramics, but instead of creating a lush, idealized landscape, he offers us a lone tree with a jet flying in the distance. This work speaks to landscape as ideology and the industrial systems that produce images of natural beauty, while actively polluting the planet. Further, it reminds us of how our own choices impact the world we share.

Thanks for visiting the Gardiner’s Plaza! We hope you find some restorative green space or your own this summer.

Artwork credits:

Partial Krokus Coffee Service, 1896 Meissen Porcelain Manufactory Porcelain, enamels Gift of Dr. Robert Siebelhoff

Joe Fafard (1942-2019, Canadian) Cow Figure Vessel, 1972 Glazed Earthenware

Paul Scott (b. 1953, England) Cumbrian Blue(s), 2007 Earthenware; inglaze decal collage

Wayne Ngan (1941-20201, Canadian) Cylindrical Vase, c. 1985 Raku with lustre glaze The Raphael Yu Collection

Shoji Hamada (1894-1976, Japanese) Square Bottle with Sugarcane, c. 1960 Gift of Elizabeth Lipsett