Dying into Becoming: How a Potter Mirrors Earth’s Evolution is a collaborative project between life-long potter artist and teacher Diane Walters and local film-maker and Emmy Award-winning editor Nancy Rosenblum.
This film explores how a potter recreates and mimics earth’s evolution through change in relationship to our mountainous and fluvial landscape.
Rosenblum started her career as an editor 30 years ago. She has worked in Los Angeles, Vancouver and Nelson. She has cut all genres including narrative, documentaries, reality TV, lifestyle shows and even game shows. She taught for three years at the Selkirk International Digital Film Program and is the filmmaker behind numerous SculptureWalk artist portraits, as well as creating her own series made up of local artists called WHAT MAKES AN ARTIST TICK? She has a passion for storytelling through filmmaking whether she’s involved in production or post production.
Walters started making pots when she was 15. Growing up with parents who owned a rock shop, she became fascinated by the geology behind her artistic endeavours in clay and glaze materials. When she pitched her idea, to make a film on the connection and relationship of a potter to Earth’s evolution, to Rosenblum, a united effort emerged and the short film Dying into Becoming: How a Potter Mirrors Earth’s Evolution was born.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down Walters’ earth studio classes, she began to conduct a ceramic response to fear and social isolation on a global scale. To this end, she developed a new product line she calls ‘Emergence’ an effort to bring the lifeline between light and human connection to the dinner table.
The connection she asks of us is to be conscious of not only the food we eat and where it came from, but the dishes we are eating from. “Making earth’s dishes brings change and connection and art into relationship with the earth and one another,” she says. “It’s a feast of ongoing change through dying into becoming something else.”
The film explores how we see change as an evolutionary process and how we embrace our landscape as alive. How can we imagine, and be inspired by, the art of becoming through an evolution of change from the earthly realm to the life of a human being making a pot? Walters claims that the finished pot both gives and receives.
This film identifies how our times are demanding this of us; to see ourselves as whole, as part of the earth, as part of all creation in the act and art of becoming more ourselves.
With the support of the Columbia Basin Trust, the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance, Kootenay Film, and the Civic Theatre, Diane and Nancy’s premiere of Dying into Becoming: How A Potter Mirrors Earth’s Evolution will screen at the Civic Theatre on July 26 at 7 p.m. A Q&A with the artists will follow.
Doors open at 6:30. Pottery sales of Walters’ work will be available for purchase in the lobby. Donations at the door to offset costs gratefully accepted.