Years ago, while working for the department of culture, Diane Gwilliam helped commission and install the large metal vine that is St. Albert’s Cultural Wall of fame. It’s an original sculpture by Kyle Walton called The Gathering, and its leaves record the names of those who’ve made a significant impact on St Albert’s artistic community.

Now, Gwilliam gets to see her own name added to its foliage: She is the 2024 recipient of The Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, which acknowledges her incredible legacy of creating and fostering art-making in the community.

“It feels like such an honour,” she says. “I've just always sort of lived and breathed art-making. I just think it's essential to our humanity.

“We know that our humanity is recorded through art,” she continues. “When you look back into even prehistoric times, we recorded our actions through art. Without art, what are we? What's our environment like? What’s left?

Gwilliam grew up making art, right from her childhood in Yellowknife: “I entered a competition in my brownie pack, and I won a little prize for making the best doll,” she recalls. But pottery, which she’d become known for, didn’t intrigue her until she found herself at a showing by the Yellowknife Pottery Guild. She hadn’t even known there was a guild until then, which was shortly before she left the city.

“They had a sale in the basement of what was City Hall at the time,” she recalls. “I found a little vase. It was like a little beaker … the colors attracted me. I bought it and I thought, ‘I'm going to do this someday.’”

That “someday” ended up taking some time—until after she married, had kids, and those kids grew up and moved out. But once she started learning pottery, she didn’t stop: Gwilliam joined the St. Albert Potters Guild in 1982, and she’s made countless pieces since then. She also taught for decades, helping generations of budding potters grow, sharing her insights, and helping keep her artform alive and lively in the community.

There’s perhaps no better tell of how deserving Gwilliam is of this lifetime achievement than to look at how many active potters in St. Albert learned from her at one point or another.

“I taught pottery for about 27 years,” she says. “Kids and parents and tots and teenagers and beginners, and then advanced [students]. I met a lot of amazing people, and a lot of the members of the guild now are my past students. It's nice to see that.”

Article written by: Paul Blinov

To learn more about Diane Gwilliam and her artwork, please enjoy the following video on this year's Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award recipient.

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