Clay Design
170 Brunswick Ave. M5S 2M5 Toronto, ON, Canada

This amazing work by Phillis McCulloch is featured in our Harbord St. window. Come check it out!

At Clay Design we are trying to figure out how to be open and closed at the same time. We have great windows and fabulous customers, a nice website. I have a shaky grasp of Social media. Paul Green has agreed to free delivery.

New slip colour! Blueish

Nesting bowls! How fabulous are they?! Still lots of time for things to go wrong!

Wayne Ngan 19 May 1937 12 June 2020 I had the incredible privilege of apprenticing with the great Canadian artist and master potter Wayne Ngan on Hornby Islan...d in the summer of 1990 - thirty years ago this summer I’ve just got off the phone with his daughter Goya to share my love and condolences to his family on his passing. A month ago, I had messaged with her to arrange a visit with Wayne - sometime this summer was the plan, once the pandemic eased up. He is gone after his final bout of cancer. In the 89-90 school year, I was in art school in Vancouver and my ceramics instructor offered to introduce me to Wayne, who had been his teacher at the Vancouver School of Art. I wrote to Wayne. He called on a Friday in May, we talked, and toward the end of the call, he asked if I could be up on Hornby Island on the following Monday. And so began one of the most remarkable summers of my youth. I made the journey up island from Nanaimo, crossed the ferry to Denman Island, and from Denman Island on the ferry to Hornby Island. I can remember the excitement in my heart upon arriving and being greeted by Wayne at his studio and into his home, situated on the north coast of Hornby Island sitting upon a cliff above the Salish Sea. I knew of Wayne from being on Hornby Island in years previous with friends. We would go to visit his remarkable studio - he was always the kindest person. My interest in ceramics in the years previous had brought me to one of his seminars up in Courtney a couple of years earlier. In my studies, I had come to learn of and to know him as the preeminent studio potter in Canada. His studio and home were comprised of many different parts. Wood storage, kilns (salt, gas, and Sung-dynasty wood-fired), clay storage, glazing area, throwing area, pot and sculpture display areas for the public, storage room, and his home. The two most dramatic parts were his incredible Sung-dynasty wood-fired kiln and his absolutely stunning garden surrounding a beautiful pond adjacent to his studio. I didn’t know anything about plants before my time there. In my first week, he had me tending to his garden he handed me a weed eater and asked me to weed eat around the pond. Later that day after I had finished he asked me to come with him to a certain area beside the pond that I had carefully cleared out. He said to me do you see this area? I said yes. He said this was an area full of such and such flowers. I didn’t know you didn’t realize what was here. I was horrified and I thought my apprenticeship had come to a conclusion. I had mowed down my master’s flowers But he was patient with me and my lack of knowledge of the incredible variety of flowers and plants that lived upon his land. The entire summer that I was there he didn’t once sit me down at the potter’s wheel and teach me how to throw a pot! And yet I wedged his clay for his own throwing, helped with glazing, loaded kilns, fired kilns, tended to customers, cleaned the studio, cleaned his home, made meals, and slept on the storage room floor. The storage room contained pots that he had kept out of the general studio for sale to the public area. They were pots he had selected for his own collection or for exhibitions. They were his best pots. I spent the summer being immersed in his rhythm and his approach to making art. I spent the summer being surrounded by beauty. I spent the summer drinking out of his bowls, eating off of his plates. In this way, I learned what a good pot is. You get to learn what a great pot feels like in your hands, its weight, its temperature, the texture of the glaze, the quality of the foot. I developed an eye and a touch for what was good and what was great. There were so many good and fun visits with his friends and family. Gailan was there a lot. I got to meet Goya Ngan as well. His neighbour Stefan would visit often. We would share a cup of tea or a meal and sit around the kitchen table, or out in the garden and talk. Helping to fire the wood-fired kilns was a remarkable experience! These massive brick and mud and stone kilns, when fired, came to life and breathed like intense and wild dragons! The amount of heat was astonishing! The rhythm of the fire breathing was unbelievable! When you fed the beast with wood, the fire would slow as if inhaling, then blast out fire 20 to 30 ft out of the huge chimney. Opening the small kiln doors for feeding wood was like revealing a small scorching sun inside the kiln. I helped him with one firing of the big Sung dynasty kiln and firing of the salt-fired kiln. Toward the end of the summer, he allowed me to fire the salt-fired kiln by myself. What an experience! My grandparents came to visit one day, Chief Doug White and Dr. Ellen White. Wayne was a great entertainer of visitors. That was a very good visit - very good conversation. Toward the end of the visit, we all went out on the front deck overlooking the ocean. And as we were there a family of killer whales swam by. Wayne was completely blown away. I don’t think he’d ever seen that in front of his house before. Almost every time in the years since then that I’ve talked to him he mentioned the visit of my grandparents and those whales. I remember when I got home that summer I was with my mother and my sister and I wanted to show off with them regarding my new knowledge about plants. Wayne had this beautiful flowering vine on the trellis over the deck on his pond. I told them it was called Vistiliah. They said to me pardon me? what is it called? I answered Vistiliah. They said to me we’ve never heard of that - you don’t mean wisteria do you? No, it’s called Vistiliah. Son I’m pretty sure it’s called wisteria. I thought about it: wisteria, Vistiliah, wisteria, Vistiliah. I thought oh my God I realized at that moment that all of my knowledge of plants and flowers that I had learned over the summer - which is vast and extensive - was all learned with Wayne’s Chinese accent! To this day I can’t distinguish between the correct and incorrect pronunciation of many plant and flower names!! Lol. Geez. I have so many more memories from that time. Cherished knowledge from that time. I will always be so grateful to him for that summer for everything that I learned from him about his garden, ceramics, painting, sculpture, about people, about the business of being an artist Sending Wayne and his family so much love. Hychqa Siem!

We are planning to take Window Shopping to a new level at Clay Design,stay tuned. Lockdown plans.... In the mean time enjoy these mugs by Lisa Gwen!

Thanks everyone that came and shopped at Clay Design the Saturday before another lockdown! It was wonderful to see new customers and people I usually see the day before Xmas! The love was overwhelming!