Laura Donefer

www.lauradonefer.com

LAURA DONEFER was born in Ithaca, NY and was raised in Quebec. In 1973 her father, then a professor with McGill University, was working with the Canadian International Development Agency, and so Laura studied sculpture for a year at the National Art School of Cubanacan, in Havana, Cuba. Back in Canada, Laura graduated with honours in ìLiterature and Languagesî from Dawson College in 1975, and with honours from McGill University in 1979. After traveling the world and working with many interesting people, Laura trained as a glass blower at Sheridan College and graduated in 1985. She has been using glass as the primary medium in her work for over 22 years, combining it with other materials. Making work is very important to Laura, but so is teaching. She has been staff in the glass department at Sheridan College and has been permanent faculty in Montreal at Espace Verre for over 15 years, helping to mold the school with her dynamic classes. As well Laura teaches regularly at the Pilchuck Glass School, the Corning Museum of Glass School, Penland School of Craft and Red Deer College. She also conducts many workshops in schools throughout North America and beyond. 2005 will be her first time teaching in Japan.

Laura also believes in supporting the work of her fellow Canadian glass artists, and is a tireless promoter world wide, lecturing extensively on Canadian Contemporary Glass in Canada, the United States, Mexico and Australia, including the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC, the Tucson Museum of Art, the University of Honolulu and during AUSGLASS in Sydney, Australia. In fact Laura has curated a number of exhibitions in the United States to showcase Canadian work, one of them being ìNorth of the Border, ì in Tucson, Arizona

As president of the Glass Art Association of Canada, Laura was instrumental in trying to unite all of the glass artists across Canada when she began publishing a quarterly magazine, The Glass Gazette,î which has developed into the major voice of the Canadian glass artist today. As well as all her teaching and lecturing, Laura keeps to a very busy exhibition schedule, and has exhibited her work internationally since 1985. She has participated in many solo and group exhibitions, including shows at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Japan, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Hammelev Arts and Culture Centre in Denmark, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, the Museo del Vidrio in Mexico, and the Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, China. As well Laura is a past board member of the Glass Art Society, and is now on the International Council of the Pilchuck Glass School. Laura lives in Harrowsmith Ontario with Dave and Ana Matisse, now 14. Laura loves organizing her wacky Glass Fashion Shows, and put on her sixth one, a WILD Burlesque Glass Show for GAS in New Orleans June of 2004, with the next one scheduled for the Corning Museum of Glass in 2009. This past summer she was an artist in residence at the Tacoma Museum of Glass, and went back to teach at Pilchuck, one of her favorite places! In her spare time she gardens, gallops horses, and has a shrine to Sponge Bob Square Pants.

There are inner forces in my life that seem to be unrelated to conscious thought, and it is from within those unseen realms that I uncover my voice. My body is my house: the bones and blood of me linking my inner core to the physical world around me. Throughout my life I have been twinned with nature, sometimes feeling no different from a tree, a stream, a boulder. I have always tried to be free within the company of the earth, to let my insides open up within the strong presence of the sensual world; licking pebbles, burying my face in moss, rolling in leaves, howling alone in the forest. The works that I create are narrators of my innermost core, and sometimes I make them bound by love, and sometimes I make them bound by lust, and sometimes I make them bound by terror. Many times they make themselves through some ancient song that only bones and blood can hear. All that I know is if I can not create, the noise within me becomes deafening, and I can no longer hear my own heartbeat

So I choose liquid heat as my main medium, and working with molten glass is like dancing the magma right out of the earth. It is hot and it is dangerous, and it feels like I am making love with the very essence of creationÖFor me glass is a metaphor for life. It can be totally transparent and reveal what is inside, or opaque to hide, or translucent, mysterious, by giving mere glimpses of what might be. It can be sharp and truly wound or luscious with life when married to colour. Glass bonds perfectly with metal and sand, and its surface can be smooth as ice or crude and rough. It has become the perfect material for my own expression, and it is an extraordinary sensuous act when I am working it hot. Yet there is that crazy kamikaze aspect of itÖlike a tightrope at the riverís edgeÖit feels like all or nothing. And that is how I like to operate, even though it is a dangerous way to live, celebrating life through fire.

I LOVE BEING A WOMAN! WHEN I MET HOT GLASS FOR THE FIRST TIME AND WAS ALLOWED TO TOUCH IT, I FELL IN LOVE WITH BEING A WOMAN ALL OVER AGAINÖ

HOW BEST TO DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL FROM THE INSIDE OUT THAN WITH A MATERIAL SO UNABASHEDLY SENSUAL, SO MOLTEN, SO HOT WITHOUT ANY EXCUSES!

GLASS TO ME IS THE ESSENCE OF THE FEMALE IN HER PUREST FORM, AND IT IS A PRIVILEGE TO WORK WITH, HOW LUCKY AM I! GLASS IS EVERYTHING THAT I STRIVE FOR, GLASS NEVER HAS TO APOLOGIZE FOR THE WAY IT BEHAVES! GLASS MARRIED TO COLOUR IS LIFE ITSELF, GLASS CLEAR AND COOL ARE THE CONSTELLATIONS ABOVE, GLASS BOUND TO METAL IS THE PERFECT RELATIONSHIP WE ALL LONG FOR, AND GLASS HOT OUT OF THE TANK IS UNIMAGINED EROTIC LOVE. IF YOU WERE TO LOOK INSIDE MY SECRET SELF, THERE WOULD BE A FURNACE OF HOT-HONEY-HORNYìHELP ME MAMAî

GLASS!!!!!!!!!!!!

AMULET BASKETS

Baskets are for carrying. They can contain fruit or bread or pebbles or fresh picked flowers. They can hold wishes or dreams. My Witch Pots were large crone baskets that held bones and dried grasses and old memories. These newer Amulet Baskets are full of hope.

One month after 9/11, I was scheduled to have a solo show in Manhattan. Though most of the work was complete, I no longer felt whole, in fact I was feeling very lost in a maddened world. I needed to create one more piece. Sitting at my torch while listening to the voices of the CBC Radio trying to make sense of a senseless act, I cried and cried. Through my weeping I made hundreds of small multicoloured disks, the flame of the torch distorted by tears. Beautiful colours of greens and purples became my salvation, and my springtime.

Colours so pure that they felt like food, food for the soul.

And I realized after a time, that I was trying to heal the world with colours, and my first true Amulet Basket was born.

ìNew World Amulet Basketî was the result of creating during the aftermath of 9/11. A fecund round purple, pink and jade green blown glass basket was completed by a branch-like handle, with the hundreds of coloured beads tied on one by one by one. At the end of the sky-facing branches were glass leaves, signifying new growth. I was trying to tie the world back together, the multicolour humanity of the planet finally united as one.

Since then I have created many more Amulet Baskets, from very small ones that can fit in the hand, to really large ones that have coloured glass waterfalls tumbling out from the handles. Inside each one is an amulet that I have fashioned for the owner of the piece, a tiny bit of my heart placed in a brightly coloured reminder of joy and of peace. Feel free to add as many treasures as possible to your own Amulet Basket.

fandango in the flames and furnace

The way I found the furnace was a convoluted path of twists and turns, leading me to a life that I love, and a lifestyle that suits me perfectly. Destiny or fate, or being in the right blink of an eye moment. Who really knows in the end, and does it matter? The important thing is to learn how to trust your intuition, to take chances that might seem off the planned pathway but in fact become the only route you want to travelÖÖ

When I enrolled at Sheridan College in 1982, it was with the intention of becoming a jeweler so I could maintain my hippie lifestyle in the wilds somewhere while making a living creating necklaces and rings for people who loved dancing. I was writing a book at the time, and put it aside to move to Toronto to be a student again. My second choice at SOCAD was wood so that I could make myself a groovy futon frame of course!

So it was with great horror when the realization (day two of my new life!) hit me that I could not handle sitting quietly for hours on end cutting metal with a tiny toothed saw, and that wood was only for the serious craftsperson not the free wheeling canít- sit- still-type. On the third day of school, at age 27, I was dragging myself down an empty hallway, tears on my cheeks for the wrong choices I thought that I had made, when a classroom door mysteriously opened and a long arm came out of it and grabbed me! I was pulled into a room where a video was playing of someone with long hair dancing with fire. It turned out that my saviour was Dan Crichton, and he somehow knew to send me down the very road that I needed to be on. What an amazing 21 year journey it has been, and I will be forever grateful to Dan, who became one of my dearest friends and my mentor, for being my guide.

Ok, so how did a hot shop crazy end up here, sitting at my torch for hours upon hours everyday, not sweating on the pad, even though it is still one of my favorite places to be in. How did my blown vessels get encrusted with hundreds of torch worked beads, and my wall pieces need thousands of off-mandrel torch worked parts? What happened to me?

In the late 80ís I bumped into a glass artist named Fig. We danced wildly at the GAS conference at Kent State, and then I lost track of him. Low and behold ten years later he showed up as a student in a class that I was teaching at Penland, and we became good friends. He and his wife were running a hot shop and a lampworking shop in Pittsburgh, and Fig needed to get out and have some glass fun. Subsequently Fig was my wonderful teaching assistant for many other classes, including Corning and Pilchuck, and we all had a blast. In between those teaching sessions Fig would send me little care packages in the mailÖÖÖ.wonderfully coloured torchworked leaves, red claws, and crusty beads, all designed to be incorporated into my Witch Pots. Oh that Fig! He had an ulterior motive the entire time of enticing me with his little glass goodies. Finally I broke down, and let him set up a fabulous torch set up in my own studio, and let him give me and my entire family a crash course in working on the mandrel as opposed to the blowpipe! By now Ana Matisse has made many many necklaces, and has taken a torch class at Corning. Even my darling non-artistic Dave has made a few marblesÖÖYes, the Donefer-Hickie family have rapidly lost theirsÖÖÖTorching is in Harrowsmith to stay!

And now my series of Amulet Baskets are dripping with torchworked additions, on and off mandrel explosions of colour. They are imbued with good spirits, all those colours exploding off the blown glass. People are so happy to have them in their homes as joyful talismans. And as well as additions to my vessel pieces, I am currently making five thousand off mandrel red components to be part of a large wall installation. The possibilities are endless, and I am so thrilled to be able to work with glass in yet another way. Sitting at the torch makes me smile; I listen to the CBC and feel cocooned against the world, my small flame and I doing a fandango of colours.

Now my studio is loaded with tons of coloured lumpy, textured beads, as well as bones and boxes of strange treasures. All the extra beads rolling around I turn into bright dangly necklaces, sometimes I wear 5 at a time, and I have sold many of them right off my neck. So a full circle has come, a spiraling back to the beginning when I thought that all I wanted was to sit in the countryside making jewelry. Dan guided me to the hot glass path, and Fig pushed me down one of the tributariesÖÖÖ

You never know which twisty way you will spiral along lifeís road. Sometimes I feel that my adventure dancing the flame and furnace fandango is just beginning. I wonder whom I will meet next?

WHAT IS A VOODOO QUEEN DOING LIVING IN THE WILDS OF CANADA???????????????????????????????????????????

A brief description of my decorating styleÖ

Beach stones from Vancouver Island, huge pinecones from Australia. Shells from Cuba. Volcanic ash from Guatemala. A garbage lid from an alley in Chicago. Years worth of my familyís toenail and fingernail clippings, (I drive them nuts..DID YOU SAVE ME YOUR NAILS I shout to my husband after his showerÖ) An ancient plastic dog with no feet from a beach in Costa Rica. Orange peels from ALL the oranges that are eaten at my house. Acres of dried flowers and plants from my gardens, my friendsí gardens, the ditches on my road, and from plants the world over..( I have been stopped and interrogated by the Agri-Police coming into Pearson Airport with my treasures.) Bags of house dust swept up. Abandoned car doors. Old rotted pieces of wood from the Coney Island Boardwalk. My prized four foot long drain hair sculpture. EVERYWHERE bones; big bones, little bones, lots of skullsÖon the walls, in the halls, in the garden. Also bags and bags of hair: horse, human, dog, wolf, cat, llama, beards in baggies, dreadlocks, chin hairs. Jars of teeth. Old rusty spiky bits of farm implements, tons of fascinating bits of rusty anything popped into my purse while on my walks. All manner of broken glass. Piles of weather beaten boards lying around the propertyÖ

AND YOU WONDER WHY I HAVE TO LIVE IN THE WILDS OF CANADA???(Dave decided that the city living was over when a box that I had shipped to myself from Vancouver Island arrived 2 months later than planned and our Toronto apartment was not equipped to house a half rotten seal carcass plus a million maggots.) It was time to find land in the country to contain my collection! Because it seems that every single thing that I come across is important in my obsessive habit of hoarding, and I have been this way forever! (At age 8 I was kicked out of Brownies because the petrified piece of dog feces that I had found utterly fascinating was deemed ìinappropriateî for the post Nature Walk show and tell.)

My grandparents emigrated to Brooklyn from Russia and my parents emigrated to rural Quebec from Ithaca, NY, where I was born. My childhood was an amazing combination of days spent roaming the nearby forests and fields with my brother and sister, rowing the Ottawa river in our rather dilapidated rowboat, hiding in the hay in our neighborís barn, just being wild! Weekends our parents tried to tame us by taking us to Montreal for some culture, but mostly we were on the loose. When my father, a professor at McGill University, went on his sabbaticals, he took the three kids and my mother (an artist) with him, so we lived in Switzerland, spent time in the Caribbean and the Americas, and lived in Havana, Cuba for a year where I went to art school. I eventually ended up back in Montreal and received a degree in Latin American Studies and a diploma in Literature and Languages. Before finding glass at age 27 I catered to the rock and roll bands in Montreal, was a superindent of a 30 room apartment house, read my poems in smoky cafes, taught vegetarian cooking, (tofu pies!) lived on a beach in Crete for 8 months, worked on a farm near Florence, did massage, canoed the Canadian shield country, and worked in a health food store advising about what to do with miso. My parents garage was still loaded with boxes of my treasures, and everywhere I went new piles grew bigger and bigger. When I finally moved to Toronto to study at Sheridan College in 1982, I had an apartment crammed with ìhuman sheddings, urban remnants, and natural bric-a-brac.î (Some people call it junk, ha!)

(Dave and I moved 13 times in 10 years. Do you know what that is like when each move has more and more boxes of NO YOU CANíT THROW THAT OUT!!)

Now we live on 14 acres way out in the country. No one bothers me anymore, in fact, people leave presents on the lawn. A wild boar head, a broken chair, a hunk of truck, a piece of bearÖÖÖ.

My studio is attached to the house, you can walk in from the bedroom.There I reside like a witch in her den, surrounded by bones and hair and jars of strange moldy things and blown glass baskets and paintings of wild haired women with huge breasts and piles of clothes that I donít know what to do with and dried up food and loads of Moretti glass waiting to be turned into amulets and jumbles of sticks and metal, and mess mess mess mess mess. And guess what? There, among all that ordered chaos and clutter (that I pay Ben Kikkert to attempt to clean up once a year so I can see the floor..)I am the Voodoo Queen, happy to be working away, the music loud, the bits and pieces around me irreplaceable, each element of my constantly changing collection reminding me of where I found it and why I love it. Textures, patterns, cracks, lines, so visually stimulating that I frequently stop what I am working on to stare in wonderment at the piece of broken pottery that I have had since I was 12, or laugh at the drain hair gracing my window like a harpyís veil.

This is where I do my work, creating pieces that are the narrators of my innermost core. For my breaks, I walk in the woods looking at the changing landscape, check out how each flower is doing in the summer, or shovel some snow into strange shapes in the winter. Everything inspires me. My strength comes from living in the visually stimulating nest that I have created for myself and my family. Memory looms large in my world, and I love being surrounded by things collected over a lifetime. The walls of this home are purple and mango orange and yellow and teal and magenta, an ode to color. The Shrine to Sponge Bob Square Pants is in the basement. People come by to visit and they can always expect a good meal and a bed if they want. The life I share with Dave and Ana Matisse and the animals who live with us is really superb.

My friends and family keep me grounded, full of love, full of life. My students keep me on my toes, and never let me take anything for granted.

And so, I spend my days working alone in my studio, captivated by turning my dreams into reality. What a lucky life, what a privilege to be a maker, to breathe with my hands, to pluck at that inner core.

When I see my work presented in galleries that are pristine white, so clean you can eat off the floor, I chuckle at how these pieces were born. Out of the fire, into the sorcererís lair, and revealed to the world, somewhat under false pretenses. Next time you are in a gallery, close your eyes and picture this Voodoo Queen in her untidy glory, tripping over her piles of possessions and humming away as she celebrates life to the hilt!

Laura Donefer

PS If you want to see more about Laura and her work, go to www.lauradonefer.com