Keira McArthur

It’s the stage where the new work leaves my (lockdown) studio and goes to the brilliant framing artist – the very one I’ve so wanted to work with – for the next stage of their becoming. I am excited about this. When I see them next, 4-5 weeks from now they’ll be beautifully framed and ready for hanging in the pop-up show. So glad they are going into the hands of someone I trust, as I do Jonathan.

I’ve not signed them yet. When I do, it’ll be a silent, internal boom of a moment – Tuesday morning as the sun rises.

After Tuesday there’ll be one more piece to come back for finishing. Made from the photographs of each I send for framing, which are torn from a larger whole. I’ll put these back together, like a puzzle – a metaphor for us, as we re-emerge into a world forever changed by pandemic. Changed, but still connected.

It’s more than that, too. Also a metaphor for the workers at the factory who fired and gilded this beautiful porcelain with steady hands (or not) as World War II raged around them, as their jewish co-workers, managers and shareholders disappeared into work camps and death marches. These people also emerged into a world forever changed, when Hitler and the Third Reich was defeated. The factory where they worked in Poschetzau (now Božičany – see note at the end of this post), was permanently closed in 1945, then razed to the ground.

How this coffee set, made so lovingly by these people between 1938 and 1945 ended up in my Hamilton Apartment is a wonder. The paintings I’ve made, about beauty, fragility and connection across time, despite long isolations and lockdowns, are dedicated to them, and to the three Jewish families who’d founded, managed and worked at the factory since 1890.

I have great respect for these pieces. Beauty and function in the midst of adversity and ugliness is an act of defiance.

Timing for the show is now in the hands of a team of us. Website designers, framers, printers – so many moving parts to get a pop-up show framed, hung and photographed, artist talks videoed and edited, press kits out, show ebooklet designed and written, photos of the work priced, input and a good online store built on a website (this one) which will be gutted and completely renovated…

…by Saturday June 19. The last day of spring, 2021. Cross your fingers and send love please – there’s a lot of prep.

[Note from July 11, 2021: The show was delayed by one month to July 18, to give us time to remove a bad website design and replace it with a great one.]

I’ll preview the show to my newsletter folks, one week ahead of the launch. If you’d like to be on that list, please write and tell me so, at keira@keiramcarthur.ca. You’ll be in good company – there’s no one on my list I wouldn’t be honoured and happy to share a meal with – and who knows? That may happen too. I send newsletters quarterly, and for special events like this one.

The Spring Pop Up show will feature sixteen Conversation Pieces, including 4 limited edition print releases (editions of 3 or 4, haven’t decided yet) from the upcoming fall launch. Sizes of work for sale vary from 8×10 to 20×16 (inches). They’ll be hung in my apartment (since public spaces are closed). The whole project is a response to lockdown, so that just makes sense to me (and it will make me clean up).

If there’s time to make it so, I’ll be offering limited edition prints of larger canvas pieces in my catalogue at the same time. We shall see what can be done.

Božičany, (which was Poschetzau when this coffee set was made), is a village [population 593 in 2011] in Karlovy Vary District in the Karlovy Vary Region of the Czech Republic. As a result of the 1919 Paris Accords the village (then population 1000+) became part of Germany, but was in Bohemia during WW I. It is surrounded by deposits of the white clay (kaolin) used in fine porcelain china. I very much want to go there.