Ceramic artist brings double-edged works to exhibition

Drawing on her Afro-Jamaican and Red River Métis heritage, Winnipeg-based ceramic artist PJ Anderson’s richly ornamented sculptural works explore adornment as a form of protection, resistance and self-definition.

Her pieces are currently being shown in the After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics exhibition at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the museum, Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND) and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Franciso, resulting in two shows presented concurrently at the Gardiner and MoAD.

Anderson is the only artist featured in both shows who was not born in the Caribbean.

“I was born in northern Manitoba. My family is Caribbean. My dad’s Jamaican and I have four older sisters who are also Jamaican, so I was very much raised in a Jamaican household,” she explains.

“I’m a Canadian of mixed ethnicity so there are some differences in the way I connect with my heritage. In my work, I was trying to distil what Caribbean-ness, Jamaican-ness means to me. I was trying to interpret that and, since my father passed two years ago, it made me think about that relationship as I was working. I ended up bringing symbols, specific things which reminded me of of my grandparents’ house or my dad making us breakfast on Sunday mornings that connected me to the Caribbean.”

But true to form, the works are double-edged.

Anderson delves into the weaponization of culture, highlighting how second- or even third-generation Canadians from parts of the world are judged by the origins of those who came before them.

“Canada is really accepting, but the rural idea of what a Canadian is … there’s always going to be that separation. It’s a thing that just sort of happens. Even though I was born in Canada, even though my mom is Métis, because I’m brown and my dad was from an island, my whole Canadian experience is invalid,” she says.

“So as much as I love Jamaica — and I love visiting, I love the food, the music, the beaches, the city, the smells, the experiences — all the things that are fantastic and wonderful and important to me are the exact things that stop me from being part of Canada. It’s very, very weird. It kind of makes me really sad.”

The Toronto exhibition features large and small vessels with Anderson’s signature smooth, burnished surfaces in shades of brown, black, grey, yellow and red, a result of smoke firing and metallic oxides, including iron and copper. The water ewers are embellished with beads and jewels which, upon closer inspection, are shaped like miniature grenades, firearms and armour.

Her Claw Forms — objects that are both weapons and a protective extension of the body — are sculptures seemingly made of metal but moulded from clay, which Anderson describes as “artifacts from a post-apocalyptic world” that examine how the body carries both vulnerability and strength

The show also features Blade Headed Pitcher, one of the first weaponized pots the artist made when she began working with clay in 2009.

“Blade Headed Pitcher is about protection and the denial of access to something,” Anderson explains. “When I was making this work, it was the very first time I really started to think about how a lot of our Indigenous communities don’t have access to water. They are on a lake, but they can’t drink any of it, they can’t touch it because it’s owned by a big company, dammed for hydroelectricity. So it’s just sitting there being awesome and untouchable.”

The pitcher is paired with Choose, a piece she made a decade later about the “faces people wear in digital spaces.”

“In real life you don’t get to decide when somebody is going to confront you about your brownness or your femininity or your queerness, but on the internet you don’t have that; nobody knows who you are unless you tell them,” she says.

“You can exist and not have to prove you have the right to exist.”

av.kitching@winnipegfreepress.com