about
Amy Gogarty is an artist, educator, and writer with a special interest in issues relating to contemporary visual art and craft. She received her MFA in Painting from the University of Calgary and taught in Liberal Studies for 16 years at the Alberta College of Art & Design in Calgary. She has exhibited her paintings and ceramics across Canada and contributed over 120 critical essays to journals and symposia in Canada and abroad. In 2006, she relocated to Vancouver, where she is active in the ceramics community. She serves on the Board of the NWCF, organizing the Speakers Series and maintaining the website. She often serves on juries and writes about ceramics, visual art, and craft. In 2021, she was named an Honorary Member of NCECA. Her studio practice involves both functional and sculptural ceramics. Recent exhibitions include Confined (group, CCGG 2022) All Consuming (solo, CCBC 2022); Between Things: Alberta Ceramics (group, AGA 2023); and Walking Alongside Trauma (group, CCBC 2025).
artist statement
I come to ceramics from painting, which explains in part my attraction to the multiple, complex surfaces that characterize ceramic materials and methods. I work in my garden and travel by foot or bicycle through an urban landscape entangled with nature. The sculptural works I make begin as thrown objects, which I shape and combine to make tableaus. My work embodies concerns about forces threatening our world, which is fragile, precarious, and in constant danger of assault. Balancing despair at our tendency to destroy with hope for our capacity for wonder, I make ceramic forms that reflect the abundance of nature and the ever-present remnants of human activity, industry and commerce. I believe in intelligent objects and in craft practice that contributes to public discourse around the daunting issues we confront. In this world, I proceed slowly, committed to making things by hand.
