The Pottery-Paul Stewart
498 Runnymede Rd. M6S 2Z5 Toronto, ON, Canada

Sinks have taken on a range of interesting looks in the last ten years. No longer are they just made from white porcelain and sunken into the counter, they can now sit above the counter (or halfway) and come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. The sink revolution has given me the opportunity to make truly original sinks and I have a lot of fun making the sinks that customers dream up.

Thanks to the generous support of the Toronto Arts Council I received a grant to be the artist in residence at Downsview Library for close to four months. I did this a few years back at Richview Library as well and it was a blast! I helped hundreds of people try their hand at the potter’s wheel (far more than anticipated) and led many children’s and adults’ sculptural workshops. I am sorry to see the end of my tenure there.

One thing I love about teaching our ten-week pottery classes is that students tend to come back session after session. I even have one student who has been around since I started teaching over 20 years ago! Because of this, students tend to get very close and we periodically get together for dinner parties at each other’s houses. One wonderful group of students call themselves the grilled cheese club. After every class, they pop over to the restaurant across the street for you guessed it: grilled cheese. It's very satisfying to see a group of people go from strangers to friends as a result of our pottery sessions.

This year, I was honoured to receive an Ontario Arts Council grant designed to help those with little access to the arts explore arts activities. For the grant, I worked with five groups all operating out of the Four Villages Community Health Centre. Each group chose a theme and set to work creating it out of clay. This picture shows three of the final installations that resulted from the workshop. Well done to everyone involved in the project!

I just finished with the 11 days of the One Of A Kind Show and it was my most successful year so far. What surprised me this time though was the success of my ramen bowls. I have come to the conclusion that a vast majority of people are eating some form of meal in a bowl. Call it what you will; ramen bowl, Buddha bowl, udon noodle bowl, pho bowl, these bowls were very, popular!