Artist Statement
Sculpture, figuration, illustration and pottery swim together very freely in my practice. I think of my artistic practice as one of a maker, led by craft and material, influenced by semi-autobiographical and observed narratives. I started in comics and ended up in ceramics, led by the resonance of materials and curiosity about process. I look for connections and make narrative vessels where larger observations and concerns become crystallized, condensed into a human-scale artifact. I’m interested in natural history, questions about fiction, perception, storytelling, and character. I see my pots like books - an object intended for a certain purpose, both public and private, often shared, entering a temporarily intimate space with a single reader or user. Pots and plots are talismans for needs being met, for connection and communication.
Atmospheric ceramic firing has led to a place where I think about molecules and air flow and combustion in the same head that thinks about comic strips and bad moods and music I loved as a teenager. I’ve given up on telling clay and glaze what to do and now I try to make things where the material gets to be in on the joke. Can I make pots that nod to the beautiful, roiling history of pottery but also talk about the iron that colours the glaze? Mighty, noble porcelain starts as a sticky sort of mud and there’s a real delight in making forms that force that confession.
I think for a long time before I start the drawing but then it goes pretty quickly. Reading comics taught me how inked drawings can be careful but casual, how a picture can be vulnerable but biting at the same time. With brushwork there’s not much to hide so you really expose your hand.
There’s maybe a certain indignity in pottery - a transparency - we look at a cup and know exactly all of its business. Sometimes I feel this in myself - that I’m as transparent as a jellyfish, that all my troubles and feelings and guts and memories are acutely visible to others, that they can look right through me and know all my thoughts. I think the impulse to turn a narrative image into an object is related to this feeling; it’s not a remedy but an acknowledgement and commitment and enrichment. A vessel says, I can’t change for you - I am what I am. But let me tell you a story. Give me some flowers to hold.
Bio
Amelia Butcher is a visual artist based in British Columbia with a sculptural and drawing practice centered in clay.
She graduated from Emily Carr University in 2013 and is a founding member of the Dusty Babes Collective. From 2015-2021 she lived and worked out of their communal studio, built by the late great Don Hutchinson, in Surrey, BC.
She has exhibited widely and instructs classes and workshops in ceramics, sculpture and comic-making for all ages. She is a board member of the BC Potters Guild and currently works out of a studio in Vancouver, the unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Writing
Cheap to Make, Fun To Spray for Studio Potter - about my introduction to soda firing and our time at Don Hutchinson's studio.
Sculpture, figuration, illustration and pottery swim together very freely in my practice. I think of my artistic practice as one of a maker, led by craft and material, influenced by semi-autobiographical and observed narratives. I started in comics and ended up in ceramics, led by the resonance of materials and curiosity about process. I look for connections and make narrative vessels where larger observations and concerns become crystallized, condensed into a human-scale artifact. I’m interested in natural history, questions about fiction, perception, storytelling, and character. I see my pots like books - an object intended for a certain purpose, both public and private, often shared, entering a temporarily intimate space with a single reader or user. Pots and plots are talismans for needs being met, for connection and communication.
Atmospheric ceramic firing has led to a place where I think about molecules and air flow and combustion in the same head that thinks about comic strips and bad moods and music I loved as a teenager. I’ve given up on telling clay and glaze what to do and now I try to make things where the material gets to be in on the joke. Can I make pots that nod to the beautiful, roiling history of pottery but also talk about the iron that colours the glaze? Mighty, noble porcelain starts as a sticky sort of mud and there’s a real delight in making forms that force that confession.
I think for a long time before I start the drawing but then it goes pretty quickly. Reading comics taught me how inked drawings can be careful but casual, how a picture can be vulnerable but biting at the same time. With brushwork there’s not much to hide so you really expose your hand.
There’s maybe a certain indignity in pottery - a transparency - we look at a cup and know exactly all of its business. Sometimes I feel this in myself - that I’m as transparent as a jellyfish, that all my troubles and feelings and guts and memories are acutely visible to others, that they can look right through me and know all my thoughts. I think the impulse to turn a narrative image into an object is related to this feeling; it’s not a remedy but an acknowledgement and commitment and enrichment. A vessel says, I can’t change for you - I am what I am. But let me tell you a story. Give me some flowers to hold.
Bio
Amelia Butcher is a visual artist based in British Columbia with a sculptural and drawing practice centered in clay.
She graduated from Emily Carr University in 2013 and is a founding member of the Dusty Babes Collective. From 2015-2021 she lived and worked out of their communal studio, built by the late great Don Hutchinson, in Surrey, BC.
She has exhibited widely and instructs classes and workshops in ceramics, sculpture and comic-making for all ages. She is a board member of the BC Potters Guild and currently works out of a studio in Vancouver, the unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Writing
Cheap to Make, Fun To Spray for Studio Potter - about my introduction to soda firing and our time at Don Hutchinson's studio.