CATHY TEREPOCKI: "Thank-you! Come again," September 15 - October 20, 2012, Alberta Craft Council, Discovery Gallery, Edmonton

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Feature Previews Fall 2012

"Bents Cup Project"

Cathy Terepocki, ceramics from the "Bents Cup Project."

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Feature Previews Fall 2012

"Bents Cup Project"

Cathy Terepocki, ceramics from the "Bents Cup Project."

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Feature Previews Fall 2012

"Elevator Plate"

Cathy Terepocki, "Elevator Plate," ceramics from the Bents Cup Project.

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Feature Previews Fall 2012

"Bents Cup Project"

Cathy Terepocki, ceramics from the "Bents Cup Project."

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CATHY TEREPOCKI

Thank-you! Come again

September 15 - October 20, 2012

Alberta Craft Council, Discovery Gallery, Edmonton

By Margaret Bessai

Cathy Terepocki loves ghost towns and the curious abandoned things in them, and after several visits to Bents, an abandoned town near Saskatoon, Terepocki decided on an intervention. She created 130 souvenir cups, and with the permission of the current land-owners, restocked the shelves of the old general store. Her documentation of the project, an installation called Thank-you! Come again is on this fall at the Alberta Craft Council gallery in Edmonton.

Terepocki has photographed Bents each time she’s visited. The village is knee deep, sinking into grassy prairie. A grain elevator, a few houses and a machine shop lean from the wind on what was once Main Street. Inside the square facade of the Red & White general store is a mix of artifacts under heavy dust: bygone products, a stack of un-delivered mail, machine parts, a row of neatly arranged, but clearly used shoes. Terepocki added her souvenir cups to the shelves, and photographed them before leaving.

The gallery exhibition includes photographs and objects made in clay. Thank you! Come again, is written on the wall in a vintage style. The phrase, endemic to stores and restaurants, has been emptied through repetition and reinvested satirically in popular culture. Here it evokes a by-gone era, and is a little ironic. A plinth holds salt-and-pepper sized grain elevators. Arranged in an arc, featureless and white, the elevators are symbolic of the train-line and towns that formed the backbone of rural agriculture.

On the wall, Terepocki’s photos of Bents give context to shelves made of salvaged wood displaying 30 cups and mugs. These are samples of the vintage Medalta tableware souvenirs Terepocki decorated in sepia decals of clip-art grain elevators and pennants, and screen-printed with glazed colour, hearts and sunsets. “I found it! Bents SK”, “I [heart] Bents”, “I went to BENTS and all I took was this lousy mug”, “I was conceived in Bents SK.”, and just simply, “Bents SK”. The slogans are also ceramic decals, fired onto glazed cups at a high temperature for imperfect results: words are crooked or have lost a letter in the kiln. A wall of hanging souvenir plates carries this idea farther. Damaged, warped, they are the opposite of shiny, gold-rimmed commemorative plates. Their designs are screen-printed details from Terepocki’s photographs of the ghost town. The glazed surfaces are sandblasted matte. Unlabelled, they carry the fragments of a narrative with a missing meaning.

Cathy Terepocki’s interest in abandoned places began during her BFA in ceramics at the Alberta College of Art and Design. A class visit to the Historic Clay District near Medicine Hat brought her to the Medalta factory site, and it looked just as the workers had left it on their last day — tools and clay-spattered aprons lying at work stations, waiting for the next work day that never came. It was mysterious and compelling. Today, the national historic site has restored Medalta as a working museum with a residency studio program for international artists, and an archive of ceramic wares and tools. Terepocki applied to develop and build “The Bents Cup Project” there, and was accepted. With the help of Medalta studio technicians, Terepocki created the cups and grain elevators from vintage jig moulds. The archive also granted her vintage ware to experiment with. She composed slogans and experimented with decals, and learned screen printing photos in glaze colours (Paul Scott, author of “Print on Clay” had just been in residence and shared his methods with the studio).

This period of research and development brought new techniques into Terepocki’s repertoire. Currently based in Saskatoon with her young family, she has a full-time clay studio and sells nationally. Her functional ware is wheel-thrown, and decorated with a fresh approach to decals, collaging florals with scientific diagrams with a printmaker’s eye and a quilter’s verve.