Ideas+Object 23

What an incredible piece of work! Xinyun (Ella) Zhang is a ceramic artist who was born and raised in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, China. She takes inspirations from her personal experience such as her realistic paintings and digital paintings. Her work explores the underglaze painting techniques on ceramic sculptures, she combines 2D decorations on 3D forms to create unique designs. Her final project titled Connection is a series of works.
Here are some pictures of one of the pieces called Realization. It looks at her first experience with losing someone when she was 14 years old when her elementary school teacher passed away. She felt that loss intensely and the memory is still with her today. At the funeral, she tried to see her face one last time, but was too short and the coffin was so big and she could not see in. She could only see layers of countless, white lily flowers.
In her piece there are two mirrors inside, showing the viewer unlimited reflections of lilies which was made to recreate that moment of confusion and searching for the lost one. Everything she has been thinking about and making this year is based on introspection and memories.
Go check out more of her full collection of works on the Online Exhibition and read all about it.

AMAZING JOB VALEDICTORIANS!
Your speeches were so great last night at our Tulip Award Ceremony. You each captured your respective studio and their essence so well. Congrats!
Santana Salcedo — Textiles 🧵
Julia Roden — Furniture 🪑
Jenn Mediratta— Glass 🧐
Patel Devya Patel — ID🧑🏻‍💻
Alice Dawson— Ceramics 🙌

Siqi Li is a textile designer who incorporates Chinese elements and lots of colours in her works. Whether weaving and dyeing, printing or wool felting, Siqi Li can skillfully blend each element and technique with unique insights and creativity in each area. Her final project titled Neglected Victims brings attention to the different social pressures in Chinese culture through a series of garment designs. The collection shows these society's repression from three perspectives. These perspectives are forced pregnancy, objectification of sexual organs, and social pressure and blame. These garments incorporate traditional Chinese designs, feminism, and themes of horror to start a conversation about how harmful certain ideas are. Siqi's experience in using various materials and techniques brings all the elements together to create a meaningful series of pieces.

Daniel Mercier is a furniture maker and sculptor. His work focuses on the materiality of wood and working with its natural imperfections to create unique sculptures. The purpose of his focus on materiality is to establish his relationship with wood and give each of his pieces a unique individuality. Daniel is interested in the process of transformation and how it relates to the human experience. His final collection titled Progenitor explores the process of transformation through contrasting lines, line qualities, and textures. The different elements symbolize the divergence between certain & uncertain and clear & obscure, that exist within the process of transformation. The reclaimed materials highlight the unique process of evolution from person to person as each has its own unique qualities and interventions. The handwork used to create the recesses further highlights the contrast that exists within each piece as every other element is created using machines.

Mariana Bolanos Inclan is a Mexican artist who specializes in ceramic sculpture. Her collection, From Seeds, describes how like seeds buried in the ground, the missing and murdered women in Canada and Mexico emerge to bring life. Using references to pre-Hispanic symbols and Mexican popular culture, she represents these stories in figurative sculptures. Her experience with ceramics began in Mexico extracting clay directly from nature. Drawing on these memories has made the language of the raw material important in her work. Paying close attention to the roundness of the form, the malleability of clay and the building of textures on the surface, her work alludes to life and fertility. She makes her work with a voice that speaks about injustice and pain, but also endurance and power; here, she conveys the stories of where she comes from and who she is as a woman and an immigrant.

Huiwen (Heidy) Shen is a Chinese artist who creates sculptural glass that brings insight into her culture in a fun and informative way. Her final Capstone project titled Chinese Zodiac highlights the twelve zodiac signs in Chinese culture. Using these animals as inspiration she presents twelve different sculptures all in a unified pose, holding their favorite food in their arms. These pieces are small sculptures that can be given as a blessing gift to friends or family for the Chinese New Year.

Dana Dallal’s work explores how personal memories become distorted over time. She creates sculptures and vessels that reference her colourful and creative childhood. Check out the palette of colored slip painted in layers to illustrate silhouettes of flowers and leaves. Gorgeous! 🌿 Our Ideas + Objects online exhibition launches this Friday! Get ready!!

Kayleigh Marshall .cosplay is a textile artist and cosplayer who has taught herself over the years to sew at an advanced level. Coming from a background in engineering, she finds inspiration in science related topics and for her final project she presents Fingerprint of the Earth, which is an extravagantly designed dress exploring the similarities between rock and fabric. These two things that seem so different, may not actually be that different at all. She brings to the surface an incredible feat: in our world there is a process happening right beneath us known as geologic folding. Tectonic plates floating on magma crash into each other with a huge amount of force. This force is enough to bend even rocks which can be mimicked using folding of fabric. To represent this in her work, Kayleigh tirelessly used hundreds of pleats to make her dress to create this effect. To deepen this connection, she even hand dyed the fabric using natural mineral dyes to give soft earthy colours. Be sure to come by the Ideas and Objects 23 Graduate Exhibition before end of day this Friday to see her work! After this you can read more about her work when the online exhibition launches Friday.

Sofia Garces-Vasquez .In.Desing is an industrial designer who strives to create functionally driven products and improve overall quality of life. By implementing environmentally friendly practices, she designs products and services for the betterment of humanity. Her final work titled Grip Gainers aims to redesign the handle grips found at the gym to improve the user’s hand-to-object interaction during physical exercise. Handle grips are currently made from materials that are not durable or biodegradable therefore they create a lot of waste and harm to the environment. Sofia’s goal was to find an alternative that better attains comfort, safety, and durability while working toward a more sustainable future.
Her unique way of working and thinking is driven by extreme attention to detail. To achieve the best result, she becomes an expert on the subject, product, or service that she designs, and her final products come from a place of passion and pride.
When the Ideas and Object 23 online exhibition launches this Friday you will be able to see for yourself her incredible process document with her extensive research and ideating. Here are a few pages pulled from this document.

Meet Rodrigo Somocurcio , an industrial designer who creates objects that are functional but also have an elegant shape. His design titled The Wrist Guardian, is a product that will support the wrist and still provide flexibility. This glove was made to protect the hands and prevent/lessen injuries such as carpal tunnel before they become serious.
He took an interest in hand pain when he started working at his internship at a wood shop. While working he witnessed how one of the floor workers could not carry with his hands because he said that his wrists could not hold onto any weight due to the repeated lifting he was doing; he started lifting with his forearms so that he could get the rest of his tasks completed. It was through addressing this issue Rodrigo saw an opportunity to help out not just his co-worker but many others. Wrist pain and injury is very prevalent in many work places and so he is offering support to a wide audience.

Jenn Rodger Mediratta is a glass artist who after several rewarding years as a homemaker, came to study Craft & Design at Sheridan College to explore glass as a medium and quickly gravitated to kiln casting. Her project titled Shaped Together creates decorative and inspirational glass art with a focus on capturing emotion in compelling forms. Inspired by playfulness and the complex relationship between parent and child, she hopes to reinforce the emotional connection of the shared moments represented in her work.

Meet Siobhan Sprikerhoff , an industrial designer whose work focuses on clean shapes, material sustainability, and ease of function. She designs and fabricates her pieces based on the idea of comfort made personal and believes that products should tell stories and create a sense of home and solace. Siobhan finds that textiles provide immense comfort and frequently uses them in her work when focusing on both design and art. Her final work “Soft Structure” explores the interaction between textiles and furniture. She aims to create a collection embodying a comforting and restful domestic experience, replicating the benefits of an embrace. This collection includes a lounge pod, a weighted blanket, and a body pillow to reduce stress and create a safe environment in which a user can relax.

Alice Dawson is an artist that uses ceramics to explore complicated feelings of being human, the intimacy of looking inward to evolve and the act of sharing oneself with the outside world. She views self-reflection as an intimate ritual and studies how to communicate the private process of picking over memories through sculptural iterations—investigating the vulnerable and complicated emotions of tracing tangled lines of memory. Her current series of works “Looking Inside” expresses the disjointed and fragile feeling of opening yourself up and looking inside. From these feelings, she creates uncanny and surreal objects that evolve as new revelations about the self are discovered and uncovered. Her piece shown in this series titled Until I'm Bones is part of this body of work where she explores self-reflection and how to communicate the intimate process of picking over memories through sculptural iterations—investigating the vulnerable and complicated emotions of opening yourself up and looking inward.
Here is an inside look of some sketches she creates freely to show her thought and design process.

As a furniture designer Julia Roden feels very close to her craft. She thinks of woodworking as something that works your body and your brain, and believes focus is demanded by your mind while your hands work magic. Her final project titled Among the Thistles directly speaks to this as she designed and created a desk that is truly magic. Gaining inspiration from her family and their Scottish heritage, she includes materials and fabrication techniques that speak to the type of work her family members have participated in for many years. Her project is about the connection that they shared through hands-on work by passing skills down from one generation to the other.
Be sure to come by and check out this beauty and to read more about her and this piece when the online Ideas and Objects 23 Bachelor of Craft and Design Graduate Exhibition launches this Friday!

Alassandra Rojo is a ceramic artist who attended her first ceramic class at Sheridan College and immediately fell in love with the medium. Her project titled Comfort in Clay shows her love of pattern, balance, and symmetry and the calm space they offer within the fluctuating ebbs and flows of life. The intricacy found in Persian rugs, Indian block-printed textiles and Middle Eastern architecture inspires her elaborate designs. Combining soft slabs and wheel-thrown components, she creates a variety of functional pieces, all with the intention of enhancing the home and daily life. She enjoys the process of making her own moulds, templates, and mark-making tools. Using handcrafted stamps, she creates floral compositions and blooming patterns on her pieces; producing detailed, embossed surface designs. Having the ability to create her own patterns provides her with the space to express her own sense of harmony and flow.

Madison Casalino is an avid natural dyer and fibre artist from Burlington, Ontario. Her piece, “Ephemeral” is a naturally dyed patchwork jacket that focuses on transitivity and the threatened diversity of Ontario’s native plant species. Natural dyes, biodegradable materials and spring blooms all exhibit delicate beauty that fades away over exposure to time and the elements. The work conveys this delicacy using soft spring colours made with botanicals such as cochineal, indigo and marigold, fine silk embroidery and soft woven wool all wrapped up in the warm embrace of a jacket. The native blooms depicted on the jacket highlight the importance of maintaining Ontario’s biodiversity and the dangers of planting invasive species. Her interest in natural colours and fibres was piqued during her time at Sheridan College, spending her summer breaks on her porch filling mason jars with local plants to test new and exciting botanical colours. Wool remains her favourite material to work with, admiring it for its texture, warmth, sustainability, compatibility with natural colours, and its myriad of applications. Her love of pastel colour, especially pinks, blues, and orange, reflect her carefree nature and desire to inspire joy to combat the increasing bleakness of the current social climate. Get ready to add some colour to your day!! Come by to see this amazing work of art. 🌸🌹💐🌺🌷🌻🌼

Madison Knott is a furniture designer who is motivated by a constant curiosity to learn how things are made. She is a problem solver, a visual and systematic learner driven by functional requirements and a holistic approach to incorporate the micro and macro levels of a problem. She strives to create work that evokes a sense of joy for the user by reimagining functional objects into fun and engaging pieces straddling the disciplines of art and furniture. This piece titled The Bela System, was designed as a contemporary cabinetry solution for entryway areas. Each object has a sense of customization for the user, while not being overwhelming to select options and easy to install. Madison worked tirelessly to create simple moments within each object that the user can find joy in.
The Bela System is being displayed in the Graduate Ideas and Objects Exhibition until Friday May 5th. Be sure to come on by and see Madison’s unique design.

Dahri Koopman is a textile artist who works with different stitch and print techniques. Their style is often evolving and not bound to one technique. Their current art practice focuses on themes of trauma and healing, and they hope this art can give others who have been through similar situations the comfort to know they are not alone and that there is no one right way of healing. Here Dahri presents a hanging piece called I’m Fine (But Please Don’t Look Through the Gaps in my Armor). This consists of interconnecting pieces that represent the artist’s healing process through sexual assault trauma. The first layer is machine stitched threads onto dissolvable fabric to create a lace-like cobweb of threads with various densities. Behind the threads is a quilted piece made of cyanotypes and screen prints with various images of organs, hands, and the body. The screen-printed images mimic the style of the cyanotype to represent the feeling of desperation the artist often experienced within their healing journey when they felt like they had to return to “normal” to be fully healed.
Dahri’s art is personal, vulnerable, and brave and not only are they bearing their soul for their art, but the goal to empower others along the way is extremely admirable. This work comes at a time where this topic needs to be discussed more deeply and fully and Dahri’s work does an amazing job at giving others permission to know healing is never linear and that is normal and okay.

Faces of the Ideas and Objects 23 Graduate Exhibition .eb Anwari Li Bickers

Katherine Tebbutt .tebbutt.designs is an industrial designer who has expanded her mediums in the art world and has applied her abilities in experimentation and user experience. Much of her work tends to push peoples comfort levels as her thesis discusses substances and stigma.
Her final project titled The Regal Roller shows her enthusiasm for cannabis and her appreciation for the attentive and specific needs of cannabis users in their use and process of their consumption. Drawing from her own personal issues regarding rolling a joint, she creates tools
to accommodate those needs. She found that many of the accessories she previously had were all missing components of the process she needed. Therefore, she wanted to create an interactive, multi-tool kit and rolling tray to assist in the need of rolling a joint on the go, or in a place where a flat surface may not be readily available.

Meet Priyam Sharma, a glass artist born and brought up in India currently living in Ontario. Priyam collects stories through her travels and her art works are influenced by a myriad of different South Asian philosophies and culture, as well as her travels throughout India and the world. She believes each one of us is a beautiful multi-faced being, all reflecting each other’s inner light like a multi- dimensional room of mirrors. Her work titled The Infinite Reflections Within Us, is an introspection into life and an ode to appreciating the experiences she has been able to collect as a conscious being. This work is influenced by her culture, travels throughout India and the world, and her yoga practice and the Yogic, Hindu & Buddhist philosophies.

When the Ideas + Objects 23 website launches this Friday you will get the chance to read each graduates process document and Emma Bickers' book is a must see. This is a document that perfectly accompanies her ceramic work. Emma Bickers explores intimate connections through visual storytelling on earthenware figurative vessels. Her body of work depicts the vulnerable theme of sapphic identity, capturing tender emotions and loving narratives on her surfaces. Originally planning on becoming an illustrator, she found interest in ceramics after taking an introductory course. She now combines the two to create colourful illustrations that decorate the surface of large organic vessels. This is work you will feel honoured to have spent time with. 📘🏺 We included one page of her doc here as a sneak peak!!👀

They say it takes a village to achieve a goal. In the case of The Hockey Rave Jersey, that saying is an understatement. In this work, Landon Carletti uses the iconic status of the hockey jersey to represent and celebrate how his experience of being in the Hockey, Q***r and Rave communities have shaped him into who he is today. The Hockey Rave Jersey comes into the world at a time when transgender existence is fighting to be seen, accepted and respected, not just in sports, but on a fundamental level of simply wanting to belong in community. See this amazing work in person this Friday at the opening of the Sheridan Craft & Design Graduate Exhibition at the Trafalgar Campus and take a deep look into Landon's creative process online next week when the Ideas + Objects 23 website launches. 💥🌈🍭🏒

ApriIyn Tompa has been busy this year in the Ceramics Studio creating narrative-driven sculptures that combine representational imagery and the human figure. Expressing personal moments that range from everyday experiences to childlike daydreams, these fantasies are brought to life with bright pops of colour and figurative distortions. Seen here are two of Aprilyn's works: 📸 1 & 2 Rotten Roots, Broken Branches . 📸 3 Skunk Girl. 🦨🦨🦨.

LETS GET REAL! Quiet Resistance is a collection of furniture that embodies Joel Galenkamp's .by.jole approach to balancing our engagement with Virtual and Real Life. He engages in the processes of design and making to imbue the Real Life values of Stillness, Nature, Relationships and Imperfection into four pieces of furniture. Through this body of work, Joel seeks to create a catalyst for connecting with Real Life through the piece's functionality, and compelling visual nature.

Dylan Newman is driven by the curiosity and hands-on experimentation of design. He enjoys unanticipated observation of the material world to influence his work and enhance people's lives in meaningful ways. CookMate is a set of protective guards for the kitchen, aimed to prevent children from reaching the stove top surface or into an open oven.

Bram Locknick is an artist and sculptor who works primarily with kiln formed and blown glass. With a background in philosophy, he follows his curious instincts in order to develop conceptual work and translate those concepts into glass.
Bram’s work explores qualities and parts associated with form. He focuses on treating those qualities as components that can be modified and manipulated to create sculpture.
He uses abstract minimalist geometric form, a set of lines and surfaces, and subtractive processes to derive sculptures. Glass has castable and malleable qualities, allowing him to create sculptures that emphasize the materials volumetric and optical characteristics.
Come check out Bram's work tonight at the Sheridan Craft & Design Graduate Exhibition at the Trafalgar Campus.

Get ready for a moment of JOY!!! Leah Phillips is a mixed media textile artist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Using animals as inspiration, her work brings people into imaginary worlds and evokes feelings of nostalgia for childhood. This wall hanging titled: Flippers and Florals explores her happy memories on both the East and West coasts of Canada. Digitally printed images of her flower photographs were printed on fabric and structured with wire. They were then combined with large naturally dyed fabric stuffed seals: two mothers and two pups. All elements were thoughtfully appliquéd to a hand manipulated background which gives an illusion of a fantasy world.

Akbar is an industrial designer who aims to implement ways in which our everyday lives can be made more comfortable. Having an interest in human interaction and ergonomics, Akbar designed Boxaid which is a better headgear system and provides the utmost necessity to save Boxers' careers and their lives. It is made to provide a greater deal of support and protection during sparring sessions, reducing the amount of head trauma that so often occurs during matches. Careers of boxers are often times cut short due to the accumulation of head trauma during sparring — and the climax thereafter in matches. Using a new padding concept, Boxaid also offers an alternative more sustainable approach to the outer wrapping leather.
Come out the the Sheridan College Graduate Exhibition at the Trafalgar Campus on now until May 5th to see his awesome design!

Helene Hadfield is a talented story teller through her ceramic craft. This piece is no exception as it is bound to draw you in to take a closer look. She draws inspiration from the natural world and the dynamic relationship between form and texture. Her creations showcase tactile surfaces and abstract paintings that offer viewers new discoveries with each observation. This work by Helene titled "My Travels on the Southwest Coast Path," is a personal journey inspired by her hike along the Cornwall coast of England. She hiked while dealing with extremely challenging health concerns and the journey became a powerful experience of self-discovery, reflection, and triumph. Her work in this series reflects that journey, teetering between the rocky and the bleak, but always with an inner resolve that things will be “okay”.