Window Gallery:
It Must Be Finished to Be Beautiful
Rebecca La Marre
June 14 – July 26 | 2025
When I throw functional-wares—items like mugs that would normally be discriminated against for display in a fine-art gallery because of their association with proximity to the body, commerce, and use in everyday life—I take the resulting scraps and fire them alongside finished pots in atmospheric kilns.
Alternative firing methods in ceramics frequently cause damage. Instead of discarding broken wares, I re-purpose shards and bring them together with the throwing scraps into assemblages.
I decorate these objects with what I find in my environment; organic materials from my garden, phosphorus from onions, iron from beets, potassium from banana peels, clay collected from the South Saskatchewan / kisiskāciwani-sīpiy ᑭᓯᐢᑳᒋᐊᐧᓂ ᓰᐱᕀ riverbank, ash from the forest-fire smoke ever-present in the air throughout recent summers. Working with these materials is a way to connect with the environment and experience agency.
The title draws inspiration from the book “It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished: A Memoir of My Body” by Kate Gies.
Rebecca La Marre is an artist in Saskatoon / Treaty 6 who uses clay, text, and the human voice to give form to questions about what it means to be a person in the world. She is interested in how the physical, tangible, and repetitive act of transforming material, however humble, can be a spring-board into the life of the mind, and how the worlds of language and the body are distinct yet entangled at the same time.
The first person to teach her about clay was her grandmother Ellen La Marre, who displayed work in domestic settings and craft markets. Rebecca holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is shown and published internationally. She is the inaugural recipient of The Tony & Herb Rainbow Award from the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts.
Image: Rebecca La Marre, When the Pot Breaks the Potter Laughs, Hosted by AKA artist-run, Nuit Blanche Saskatoon, 2021
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