David Tsabar
Medium: Ceramic
Location: Vancouver, BC
Member Since: 2024
ABOUT
Clay is my midlife crisis. Some people get divorced or red convertibles, I signed up for an evening class at the West End community centre because my mom said I should learn to do something with my hands. Always listen to your mom.
To say I got sucked in would be understating the case. To say I'm self taught would be both correct (all those late nights throwing at the UBC pottery club!) and incorrect. Better to say that I sought every mentor I could get, and worked at what they taught me until I got it.
Clay is a solitary medium and I am a solitary person, but I like my clay buddies. I've been a member of the Burnaby Potters' Guild at the Shadbolt centre, and when my travels took me to Paris for a year, I found myself a wheel at the Chemins de Terre pottery school. That cemented my ongoing obsession with glaze. Do something with your hands, sure, but glaze is both cerebral and utterly magical. You can think about it all you want but in the end, you put it in the belly of the kiln, and wait with baited breath for the answer. That my glaze work has appeared in books and journal articles is wonderful. but not as wonderful as opening a kiln and seeing what it has in store for you. Knowing that you're about to know something you didn't know before. And creating beauty, and the potential for others to create beauty, in a world that needs it so badly.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Porcelain has always been my clay of choice. It is immensely gratifying and frustrating, and it is always a challenge to try and push it a bit more and see what comes out. But my work is deeply functional and I take great care to make it a pleasure to use, despite its idiosyncratic appearance. I aim to bring beauty into the small rituals of our daily existence.