Micki MacKenzie 2023 Awardee Coral Patola aims to instil mundane objects with mindfulness and attention, creating utilitarian art that inspires people to slow down and appreciate the complexities and interconnectedness of ourselves and the outer world, spanning generations through materiality and form.

Coral hopes to create modern heirlooms capturing the ephemeral presence of nostalgia. She is currently exploring patterns and motifs found in women’s work. Examining the matriarch’s role in passing down familial knowledge and tradition as an exploration into understanding her personal relationship to gender and place within the Chinese diaspora as a 1st generation mixed-race Canadian.

Coral has been offered an artist residency at Medalta, where she intends to develop a personal collection of heirlooms documenting her maternal family history, with the support of this Bursary.

Micki MacKenzie 2022 Awardee Ilana Fonariov is a self-taught potter living and working in Galiano Island. Ilana is a lover of clay and its malleability; she is drawn to black clay most of all, for its drama and starkness and for the challenge of finding ways to soften it. With this bursary, Ilana seeks to develop her art through a ceramics program at Selkirk College in the fall of 2022.

Micki MacKenzie 2021 Awardee Aimee Taylor is a craft artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. She incorporates her skills in ceramics and jewellery in her practice. Aimee had her first exhibition in jewellery upon completing the first year of the VCC Jewellery Program.

Her work is inspired by the geometric regularity of rock formations, specifically hexagonal volcanic rock arrangement; she designs pieces to convey their repeating, yet asymmetrical patterns, and their striking nature. Found in unique regions of the world such as Giants Causeway, Ireland, Aberdeen Columns, BC and Devil’s Postpile in the US these basaltic columns are formed from cooling to create towering hexagonal shapes and can be so perfectly geometric that they seem out of place in nature.

Micki MacKenzie 2020 Awardee Sorrel Van Allen is a jeweler and silversmith with a background in welding and artistic blacksmithing who will be pursuing a one year residential silversmithing course at Bishopsland Educational Trust, Reading, UK. She graduated with a B.F.A., Major in Jewelry Design and Metalsmithing from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2020. 

Inspired by botany, she has found silversmithing techniques such as chasing and repoussé, anticlastic forming, and raising to be challenging and rewarding processes to express her designs. Bishopsland’s uniquely structured program is the ideal place to further develop these traditional skills. The emphasis on hands on learning, professional practice, and an immersive group environment will bring her silversmithing to a higher level.