County studio tour

Studios open their doors for the weekend

Elizabete Ludviks wears some of her own hand-crafted silver jewellery at Ember Studio on Bethel Road.

The County’s 26th annual Studio Tour took place over the weekend and drew hundreds of visitors to the 31 studios showcasing the work of 47 artists. Co-chairs Dale Wainwright and Jennifer Topaz Bruce and their team worked tirelessly over long hours to organize one of the County’s signature annual events. The participating studios span the breadth of the County from Carrying Place to Cressy, and there is a variety of works on offer covering the range from painting to photography, stained glass to sculpture, and ceramics to cabinetry. One of the appeals of the studio tour is that it covers such a wide swath of the County. “You can really make a weekend out of it, and it encourages travelling around the County, discovering new places, or maybe even getting lost,” says Bruce. There were a number of changes this year, based on feedback from the participating artists as well as visitors. The studio tour opened late on Friday afternoon, instead of all day as in previous years, and there were designated picnic areas where visitors could sit and relax for a while.

Several of the studios invited guest artists to join them for the weekend, so that visitors could have access to a wider variety of artwork. Ceramist Andrea Piller is the owner of Ember Studio on Bethel Road. She has been participating in the studio tour since 2012, shortly after she moved to the County, and has always felt that her property was meant to be shared. This year she invited local glass artist Michael Herman and jewellery designer Elizabete Ludviks, who is based in Hamilton. One of the intriguing things about Ludviks, who normally works using reclaimed silver, is that some of her jewellery pieces are made using a 3-D printer. “I happened across it almost by fluke,” she says. “I took a course in 3-D printing and realized that some of my shapes could very easily be translated to be printed.” The combination of Herman’s colourful fused glass pieces and Ludviks’s geometric silver designs proved to be a good complement to Piller’s own ceramic creations. “I love the camaraderie and the collaboration and the discussions that I have with my guest artists,” she says.

There were a number of first-time artists on the studio tour this year. One of them was Elaine Kent. She is a watercolour painter, but has recently begun to explore painting with materials that she has made herself. She paints using coffee as a pigment, and is experimenting with natural colours she obtains from the plants in her garden. “I would like to extract what nature provides, and then when I do a painting of a tree with the bark and the leaves, I know the colours actually come from a plant.” She says that visitors to her studio have expressed great interest in how she obtains her natural colours, and she is considering holding workshops in the future. Another new artist on the tour was weaver Vicki Alayne Bradley, who has been a resident in the County for only 18 months. She uses a variety of fibres and textiles to create her designs, which almost all include sweeping wavy lines. “Weaving is the kind of art style that you don’t see every day and this was a great opportunity to be part of a collective of artists and gain some exposure,” she says. “Prince Edward County does have a really great supportive artists community, and I think we all inspire each other.”