Jack Sures at the National Gallery

A top craft prize, the Saidye Bronfman Award, lets the Regina ceramicist pilot his clay vessels through the breach between art and craft at Canada's top gallery.

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At age 83, influential Regina ceramicist Jack Sures has finally made it into the National Gallery of Canada.

Sures is the recipient this year of the $25,000 Saidye Bronfman Award for Fine Craft. That means examples of his work, where the natural world blends with the fantastic, can be found until Aug. 5 in the National Gallery exhibition honouring him and the six artists and one curator who received a 2018 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

The National Gallery does not own any of Sures’ work because the Ottawa institution does not officially collect or exhibit craft, even though it has a large historical collection of utilitarian silver objects.

“The National Gallery has always been elitist when it comes to crafts,” Sures says in an interview.

Thus, exhibited pieces made by Sures – a plate, a wall hanging and an urn decorated with his trademark bandicoots – were borrowed from Regina, either from his dealer, the Slate Gallery, or the MacKenzie Art Gallery, one of several art galleries in Canada and Europe that collect his work.

The National Gallery does collect work from other prominent members of the Regina Clay Movement of the 1960s, including Joe Fafard and Victor Cicansky. Those artists use clay to create sculptures, while Sures has largely concentrated on decorative utilitarian objects.

Cicansky, who studied with Sures in the 1960s at the University of Regina, says he expects the kind of objects created by his former teacher will eventually be given greater recognition: “Sooner or later, these things will become part of the national collection.” Behind the scenes, some National Gallery curators agree.

Sures says he decided to stick largely to making vessels because “I thought it would be easier to make a living.”

As a young backpacker in 1960s Portugal, Sures sold unadorned vases for 50 cents each. Those vases have dramatically evolved. Listen to Virginia Eichhorn, of Owen Sound, Ont., one of the judges in this year’s Saidye Bronfman competition. She was the senior curator of a nationally touring exhibition of Sures’ work, Tactile Desires, which stopped at several important Canadian galleries from 2012 to 2014.

“His work is amazing,” Eichhorn says in an interview. “There is a huge range from experimental to cross-media and different cultural references, but the work all embodies a certain ‘Sures’ quality to it.

“Whether the work is functional or fantastical, it delivers aesthetically. As a teacher, I believe his influence is profound and that he has likely – directly or indirectly – influenced the majority of ceramic artists in Canada. With his work, you get a great sense of his personality, his humour and his earthy passions.”

Julia Krueger, a native of Regina, has studied the work of Prairie ceramicists and is pursuing a doctorate in Canadian craft at the University of Western Ontario in London. She nominated Sures for the Saidye Bronfman Award.

“His surreal murals are sublime manifestations of the Prairies,” says Krueger. “For example, with the Sturdy Stone Centre mural in Saskatoon, the viewer feels, just as much as sees, when confronted with this enormous publicly accessible example of Canadian craft. These feelings, in combination with the surrealistic, fecund scenes of overgrown landscapes found in many of his pieces, make him an important contributor to the Prairie Gothic aesthetic.”

Krueger says Sures’ work is both art and craft. “It is art because anything can be art under the right circumstances. It is craft because Sures works within the limits of craft and ceramics and has adopted a way of doing things which is craft based. He is a dedicated vesselist who conceptually engages with the vessel and pushes the limits and constraints of clay.” ■

The exhibition is on view at the National Gallery of Canada from March 29 to Aug. 5, 2018.