Featured Artist: Jaxx Bonnamie

Shop Jaxx Bonnamie's featured ceramics online, here.

Based in London, Ontario, Jaxx Bonnamie is a neurodivergent, transgender ceramist. His work combines a long time love of illustration with ceramic through a technique called sgraffito, wherein designs are carved into unfired clay and slip. Through visuals that are often both morbid and a little raunchy, he creates striking pieces of art that are sure to spark conversation.

“My figures are sculpted by hand, with special attention paid to make detailed faces and hands. They’re then painted with black slip and have pictures and designs etched into the leather hard clay. When fired the slip turns glassy, highlighting the texture of the etched surface."

Visit our Queen Street Shop to see the Retail Feature, from January 31 – March 8, 2026.

“I have been an artist for as long as I can remember and engaged in a variety of mediums: drawing, painting, textiles, print making, etc. Illustration has always been a passion of mine that was important for me to be able to incorporate into ceramics. I wasn’t introduced to clay until high school and it wasn’t until I discovered sgraffito that it really clicked for me. It is the merger of clay and illustration that has me hooked."

“Getting to do the sgraffito is always my favourite part. It’s a meditative process that I can get lost in. I was introduced to the technique when I discovered the works of Kathy King in 2018. The technique is quite visually similar to linocut printing, another medium I have experience with, and gives such a stark graphic quality to the work. I love everything about it: the high contrast, the texture, the meditative process of carving. It’s everything to me. It is what makes me love ceramics."

“I had to fight my professors tooth and nail to create work in the style I love. All of my favourite parts of these works (the horns, the big ears, the illustrative facial expressions) were things I was constantly being pressured to stop doing. There was so much pressure to stop making stylized sculptures and make super anatomically correct human sculptures. I felt like they didn’t listen to me because the whole point was to never be human. There will be people who think they know better than you and it’s important to create what makes you excited, not what someone else is telling you is the “right” thing to make."

“My whole graduate body of work was about identity. I’m trans and autistic. For my whole life before I knew these things, I felt like an outsider pretending to be human. I felt like there was something inherently wrong and bad about me. My work is about taking that otherness and making it wonderful. Instead of saying, ‘it's okay, you were human all along’ it says ‘So what? I’m still here.”

Shop the collection Online or in person at 1106 Queen Street West, from January 31 – March 8, 2026.