Port Moody Arts Centre’s current Ceramic Artist-in-Residence Ray Tse has now completed his year here. Along with supervising the Tuesday Open Studio clay drop-in sessions and teaching pottery classes he has been using his studio in the Arts Centre to make impressive sculptures for his final show.

Last January we invited Ray to speak to TriCity Potters and at that time he showed us a technically challenging and visually disturbing sculpture which dealt with the horrifying tainted milk scandal in his home country of China. But he was also spending time perfecting his wheel-throwing skills as part of his residency challenges, and to prepare himself for a planned career teaching ceramics.

https://www.gillianmcmillan.com/2016/01/22/ray-tse-cair-port-moody-arts-centre/

On Thursday “7.4 Billion Little Steps” opened in the 3D Gallery. For his final presentation to this community (that includes Vancouver where he graduated from Emily Carr U) he has chosen to show almost exclusively some large, and again disturbing, sculptures. Visitors to this show will see that Ray has a wide range of skills in ceramics and has included pieces fired in various ways, from glazed, to painted but unglazed to raku. I photographed the pieces that grabbed me and note that all these moving creations address environmental issues.

His artist statement for the show reads:

Ray Tse believes art is a universal language. During his residency he challenged himself to make art about world issues that everyone could connect with and respond to, raising awareness that a step by every person in the world will add up to environmental changes.

He has placed post-it notes for visitors to write down what they think they could do to make a difference in our threatened world. I admire his passion for the environment and the strong work he has made to prick our collective conscience with art. I hope we will see more of Ray and his passion in the future. His students will have a conscientious teacher.

I have focussed my comments and photos on the ceramic work in the gallery this month, but I really enjoyed the paintings in “Points of View” as well, and was so busy at the opening that I have yet to pop in to see the other show “Vanishing Species and Our Changing World” which also seeks to stimulate our social conscience.

On Wednesday evening June 15th we, the TriCity Potters, will hold our final meeting of the year at 7pm, so I must plan to get to the Arts Centre early and see more of this month’s shows in the galleries.