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EXHIBITION EXTENDED: Visit 'Void' in the Craft Ontario Gallery until March 30!
EXHIBITION EXTENDED: Visit 'Void' in the Craft Ontario Gallery until March 30!
What Grows Between Tiles: Marc Egan’s Tree of Life

What Grows Between Tiles: Marc Egan’s Tree of Life

A distinctive characteristic of a craft artist is a dedication to their materials; the need to understand the compounds of what they are working with and the joy of discovering new combinations of raw materials. An exploration of raw materials can be especially fascinating in ceramics and is something that longtime Craft Ontario maker Marc Egan has been centering in his studio practice for years. Marc showed his largest installed tile work to date, Tree of Life, in the group show, Elaborate, curated by Melanie Egan (no relation) at Harbourfront Centre at the end of 2024. The following writing comes out of a studio visit with Marc, from the time Elaborate was on view.

Currently Marc is working with raw materials gathered directly from the source, testing three variations from clay he found in Oakville and Toronto. Providing seemingly endless clay combinations and glaze tests, so far the Oakville clay gives a glaze that is dark brown in colour and the Toronto glaze is greenish-brown. This experimentation process is one Marc expresses he would ideally do as his whole practice - if it paid. Marc's practice has always been divided between making and teaching. While creating the Tree of Life, Marc was teaching three days a week at Sheridan College, Oakville, Ontario where he is currently part-time faculty in the Ceramics Department. Over the past 30 years Marc has also taught at the Gardiner Museum, George Brown College and Harbourfront Centre.

The illustrative surface design of Marc’s works are made using a wax resist border within the piece, a technique called cuerda seca (Spanish for “dry cord”), which was historically developed to speed up the mosaic process; rather than cutting tiles, shapes were outlined to give the sense of grout lines. Marc started his practice with vessels and plates, wheel-thrown shapes. After years of developing his own glazes and designs that would wrap and warp on rounded surfaces, he began working on tiles to best showcase his drawings and glazes.

The drawings themselves take the shape of botanicals, flora, and…industrial pipes. They portray organisms that seem futuristic yet probably-most-likely growing right now from a crack in a foundation of an old production building in the Junction, or in the deep sea. Marc has been drawing these plants for years, he doesn’t use reference books for the drawings but has looked to his environment in and around the studio for shape references. Since the 1990’s Marc has worked in studio spaces around the Lansdowne and DuPont area. He is currently in one of the last artists’ studios buildings in Toronto that hasn’t quite been reached by gentrification. 

For years he was focused on learning about the Arts and Crafts movement and industrialization, while working next to industrial buildings and well-used train tracks. Marc described the area around his studio then as being a bit of a wasteland, as well as somewhere plants were growing abundantly through the cracks in the built structures. His drawings increasingly incorporated the shapes of industry with new growth. 

“I have always worked in old buildings like this,” He shared, “a lot of my drawings are based on non-plant like things…it is my understanding of the environment and how at some point in history we developed an idea that there is nature and then there are humans. This being a city is different from an anthill…but it is still an anthill. It is a natural environment, everything is connected. Western society is slowly coming back around to that idea. As long as we have separation we are never going to get anywhere.”

Marc’s embrace of regeneration was at the core of Tree of Life, which was made up of 56 individual tiles. When the piece was installed (by way of French cleats and a to-scale installation map on paper), this was the first time Marc saw the entire image together on the wall. This is the third largest tile panel he has made to date, but the other two have never been installed. When he began making large scale tile work, he started with developing a new clay body, then learned how to make the pattern pieces journey with registers at the edges, and then how to transfer the drawings from paper with glazes.

When talking about the meaning of the piece, he said, “for the Tree of Life, what I was trying to do there was capture a very old, wizened tree that had been through a lot, has broken branches, is twisted, is a tree that is resilient. The outburst of different flowers on it is about the constant renewal of life and showing there is still hope and that the growth can keep going, that there are all these new possibilities and regeneration despite the fact that there is a collapse.” The collapse he is talking about in the piece is a section near the bottom of the composite image of a broken branch going into the water. Getting the perspective right on this branch was one of the most difficult parts of the tree to convey accurately for Marc, “I kept trying to draw it in a way that was realistic, but the more realistic it got - the more difficult it was to read because I was basically using black lines over patches of colour, so I had to stylize it, giving it a fibrous feel.” 

When Marc creates pieces for exhibitions now he makes sure to leave room for wonder, for the visitor to stop, look, and consider the piece and the glaze, the way one might stop and consider a plant. 

 

 

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