When Jim Thomson made the permanent move last summer from his town house, situated a few blocks from Ottawa’s By-ward Market and the nation’s cultural centres, to a summer residence in the Gatineau Hills, he went muttering predictions of cabin fever, of bearded wild-eyed hermitry, of flight to foreign parts and sunshine during the long dark snowy winter. There were compensations, of course, not least among them a bright and spacious studio compared with the tiny Ottawa dungeon from which he has produced series of amazingly large works, with lush, tactile accretions of glazes, often brilliantly coloured. Contrary to Jim’s predictions, the winter landscape became a rich source of inspiration, his popular summer school in a separate building on the property carried on with local students, and social comings and goings sped the winter into a late spring of trilliums, loons and blackfly. ‘Impressions from Lolaland’ is a personal diary, informed by experiences, dreams, commissions and clay practice, of this year in the Gatineau.

Jim, like many Canadian potters, is self-taught. Years of practice and experiment, a determined commitment to the economic unpredictability of an independent studio, and a deeply considered response to his personal experience and environment, has led to recognition as a brilliant ceramic technician and a highly individual artist. Deliberately isolated from contemporary academic discourse, Jim’s work touches but is not centered on many of the referential threads underlying current craft practice – historical forms, antiquity, material and process, the natural environment and the spiritual quest. Jim thinks in and through clay.

Of the genesis of the Chick-a-dee plates, Jim wrote, “Last year after a good snow storm the following day was absorbent. The fresh layer of pristine snow created a ‘visual acoustic’ where not only sound was absorbed by the snow but light as well… a sort of cotton in the ears effect, where external sensory [perception] is tempered making one acutely aware of being situated within and part of a place. It was with my awareness of this that a chick-a-dee flew by and decided to rest on my outstretched hand and sing one clean isolated song to the world.” How can this sort of experience be recorded or discussed in clay? Clearly it requires something beyond a literal, visual picture to convey such an intense, encompassing moment. Jim offers us plates. Plates have a particular role, they display food or (in our culture) they carry individual helpings of food. Food – essential, nutritious, charged with emotion, sensuality, ceremony and custom – is contained in a distinct area – the plate. Jim’s collection of plates obviously are not made for eating off, the plate and what it contains is one, a bearer of soul food, a fragment of time, a focussed gaze, charged elements encircled by a rim.

If the plates enclose a world, the glazes add mood, incident, reference. Jim’s distinctive repertoire of glaze textures are transformed by multiple firings into a volcanic residue of cracks, fissures, bubbles, and liquid trails, slicks and pools. Jim plays with glazes to suggest turtles in The Turtle Party plates, to suggest the deadening quality of snow, the effect of sound or movement in a winter world, the glistening remnants of a puddle. His palette uses rich and sombre clay tones reflecting fragments of landscape and the ancient practice of his medium, spiked by quirky nail polish pinks and greens, brilliant acid yellows and rich blues, hues from the late twentieth century chemical industry.

These delicious sensual surfaces ask to be caressed. They are truly in the rich craft tradition of work that is not only visually and conceptually fascinating but moves beyond to a tactile richness. The Stepping Stones and Shoebridge beg to be touched and in touching to be lifted and turned to see the underside, or is the topside. As with many of Jim’s pieces, these works play with us, frustrate (after all which way up is most enchanting; a choice must be made) and, as these are not small pebbles to turn in one’s hand, demand more than a trifling physical and intellectual response. The conventions of upside down and right side up reoccur in Turtle Ascending. Sitting beside Lola Lake, drained after a day in the summer school studio, Jim watched a large old turtle rise to and break the lake surface and pondered the viewpoint of turtles and other denizens of the aquatic world, the weight of legend and symbolism that they unknowingly carry.

Physical and metaphysical meet in many of these works but most directly in the meeting of dream, occurrence and commission. Maddie’s Mittens came from a vividly remembered dream about red mittens and the arrival a week later, from a complete stranger, of a commission for an urn accompanied by a photograph of red mittens.

Whatever the source of inspiration, these works are infused with humour, delight and mystery; they call us to gaze, to ponder, to enjoy.