To call Elke Blodgett a local legend doesn't quite do her justice.

She earned that title many times over: more recently with her environmental work, showing up at city council and passionately speaking about the health of the community. But her decades-long career making ceramics and pottery, building kilns, and teaching, was just as impactful.

Blodgett passed away in 2018, but her legacy still looms large, which will be explored in Fire in Her Hands, a new exhibition celebrating Blodgett’s life and work at the Art Gallery of St. Albert.

“She's this person in St. Albert that everyone seems to have a story about,” gallery curator Emily Baker explains. “Everyone has memories of her, for various reasons, in all the different areas of her life. … So it's nice to be able to bring that all together as a bit of a memorial, a celebration, a retrospective, around her and her work.”

To do so, Fire In Her Hands gathers a wide array of Blodgett’s sculptural pieces from across her forty-year career, as well as a recreation of portions of her studio and house, historic photographs, prints, and more.

Baker notes that groundwork of this retrospective began with her curatorial predecessor, but she and the gallery have been working closely with Blodgett’s family to present an encompassing vision of her  life.

“We've also been collecting stories,” Baker says. “We've been interviewing friends and family members, community members, to build a video for the exhibition space that has memories of what people remember most about her. … being able to connect those memories and that impact she had that's outside of, or beyond, the objects that she's created.

“I find them really mysterious,” Baker says, of Blodgett’s works. “There's a lot of open-ended storytelling in the pieces. … She didn't want to tell you exactly what to think or feel about them. She often said she didn't know what they were about. She talks about [how] her practice is making an invisible part of herself and her experience and her emotions visible to herself. And so she wants people to have the same experience. I find them really emotional.”

Baker never met Blodgett, but from the art she’s gathered and the conversations she’s been having, she’s getting a sense of the person that left such an impact on St. Albert.

“I hope it brings about this idea of a really whole and complex person,” Baker says, of the exhibit. “She was really driven. She just had this outpouring of energy and creativity and drive to create—she's someone who needed to create. We're hoping that we can connect the different parts of her history that people know, so the people who knew her as a potter would get a chance to reconnect with her ceramics, [while] those who knew her more as an environmentalist, would get a chance to see this creative side of her that they might have heard about … But we're hoping that we'll be able to capture that energy, which is what feels like it's most left its impact on the community: whatever it was she was doing, she was fully invested in it.”

Article Written by: Paul Blinov
Photo Credit: Elke Blodgett, Druid series, raku, 1992-1993

Fire in Her Hands runs from July 11th to August 10th at the Art Gallery of St. Albert.

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