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Darren Emenau | Episode 1007
Darren Emenau is a Canadian artist whose work is rooted in contemporary art. Over his twenty five year career, Darren has explored surface treatments, forms, abstraction and installation. Darren’s work has been recognized through awards, grants and exhibitions both nationally and internationally.
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Do you find it difficult to make multiple lines for your work?
No I actually really enjoy it. I guess I am a hyper individual. I do about fifty or a hundred different things all day so the thought of doing one thing all the time frightens me. I will take a month to work on this sort of a thing and I will stop and I will work on another and a lot of it is dealing with and working with different clays as well. So you wnat to keep your studio really, really clean before you transition.
How do you devote your time between the two practices?
Well, there’s sort of three things because there is also just running around and mucking about, life. I have a daughter so one of the best things to me about being a potter is the flexibility and my own time management. I have to drive my wife to the airport tomorrow and then I am going to go skiing for the afternoon and then I might go do some rock climbing. It sounds like I am living the life of Riley but it’s not quite that because I still have to fit everything in . But I love how I can choose my own schedule.
Is nature a big source of inspiration for you?
Yeah, it definitely is especially the one off stuff I would say more than anything else. I am not doing this presently but I used to have on another property a wood kiln that I built and it’s also this aspect of do what you can with what you have. I didn’t have the money to buy a wood kiln so I tore down old buildings and chopped down trees and tore apart old kilns and rebuilt everything. I had lots of locally sourced wood but I also dug clay and I wanted to create the way potters used to in their day.
How do you go about shipping your flocked pieces?
When I do apply the spray after a few of them may come out but it’s pretty good. You can wrap it up and m ay loose a couple of little hairs. I first started shipping my delicate pieces when people requested them and I realized with ceramics little bits can fall off and it’s okay, it’s kind of like paint on a door. And I just tell people that if you get a pen knife or a finger nail you might be able to chip off little bits. It’s kind of like Raku, the luster pieces over time if they sit in a window they’ll fade and stuff like that. I am fine with that even though my background was to have a very inert surface. Traditionally that is what I was taught but it’s okay for it not to be.
What is the biggest studio challenge that you have right now? Something you are trying to solve but you haven’t quite got solved yet.
Well I just got these big bags of hair so I’m trying to figure out….my friend claims that she washes all her client’s hair so I was a little grossed out about that aspect. But I have to figure out to actually get these on. Because sometimes I want it to look like a head of hair so I am trying to figure out how to go from there. But also not to think of it as hair but just different materials. That’s probably what my biggest thing is at the moment.
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mnoclay.com
Instagram: @darren_emenau