Sarah Graeme recently moved to Denman Island to work with and learn from noted B.C. artist Gordon Hutchens, whose wood-fired ceramics pieces are featured in collections around the world.
Ceramics by Sarah Graeme, © Sarah Graeme
This is just one of many moves Sarah has undertaken to learn from artist–mentors in the field of ceramics since she finished grade 12 with SelfDesign® Learning Community in 2013.
In 2018, she took part in a residency in Puebla, Mexico. Earlier, she moved from Nelson, where she grew up, to Halifax to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. When she returned to B.C. in 2021, she built and lived in a clay house near Sooke, on Vancouver Island, where she apprenticed with Victoria-based ceramics artist Samantha Dickie. In early 2023, she was in Denmark for a residency where she focused on learning wood-firing techniques.
Sarah creates both functional ceramics — mugs, bowls, vases and plates — and clay sculptures. Her sculptures often combine ceramics and wood, basketry and woven fibres. She has shown her work in exhibits at Lalani Jennings Contemporary Art Gallery, in Guelph, Ontario (2023), as well as in solo and multi-artist shows on Vancouver Island (2022) and in Dartmouth (2022) and Halifax (2021), Nova Scotia.
The young artist credits her ongoing love of learning and choice of career to her experience with SelfDesign.
Excited about learning again
“SelfDesign impacted my learning journey immensely,” she says. “I had been in a very disconnected place at the public high school in Nelson. It was just becoming really hard for me to engage with some of the subjects I had to take, and I was feeling disinterested in learning and in school in general.”
But in grade 10, Sarah enrolled in an after-school ceramics class for art credits. The class was offered by Diane Walters, a well-known Nelson-based ceramicist who was also a SelfDesign educator.
“That was my introduction into the world of clay,” Sarah says.
Sarah was so taken with Diane’s course, she enrolled in SelfDesign Learning Community the following year and became one of the learners Diane worked with regularly.
“For me that was huge, because it just provided all these ways that made sense for me in my learning and especially for ceramics,” she says.
For example, Sarah says the sciences were an area she had a really hard time being interested in.
“But Diane made this whole connection between Chemistry and clay and between the Earth Sciences and clay, and it just made all of the science so much more interesting and relevant for me in a tangible way where I could make sense of things,” Sarah says. “And she had some really great lessons about connecting the human body to all you do when you’re working with clay because it’s such an active, engaged activity, and that was extremely impactful for me. There were so many different things, and it was all interconnected. It has made a lot of difference in my life because it ignited a passion,” she says. “That way of whole-life learning got me excited about learning again.”
SelfDesign Learning Community starts offering high school options for B.C. learners
From its start as an online school in 2002 until 2009, SelfDesign Learning Community offered choice in education to learners in kindergarten to grade 9.
That changed in 2009, when SelfDesign Learning Community merged with the International School of the Kootenays, a private school in Nelson. Beginning in September of that year, young people across B.C. could enrol with SelfDesign for grades 10 to 12 and finish grade 12 with a Dogwood Diploma, an Adult Dogwood Diploma, or a BC School Completion Certificate.
The merger was a solution that worked for both schools, says Diane Walters, who had taught at and designed curriculum for the international school before the merger.
“What SelfDesign had were the students but not an accredited high school program,” Diane says. “And what the International School of the Kootenays had was a BC Ministry of Education–approved and –accredited high school program, but they didn’t have the students.”
After the merger, SelfDesign learners in grades 10 to 12 from across B.C. took online courses and engaged in personal projects of their choice to explore their interests further and deepen their own learning. They were also free to and encouraged to access learning opportunities within their local communities. For example, they could take singing lessons with a local voice teacher, sign up for art classes at a local studio, or join a local hockey or basketball team.
In the Nelson area, they could use a community space arranged by the school to come together, take workshops, engage in projects and hold events in community with each other within the larger Nelson community. Some of the offerings provided were more structured, offering a combination of online learning, in-person workshops, group presentations and project-based learning several days each week, as well as group trips to places in B.C., Canada and elsewhere.
Learning about the world and one’s self
In September 2012, as part of her learning with SelfDesign, Sarah travelled to Australia with two other learners and an educator to attend a youth-facilitators training course called Youth Leading the World.
“It provided training on how to take big, overwhelming environmental concerns as young adults and bring a group with you through a series of facilitated questions to figure out tangible actions that can be taken, and then come up with actual projects that the young people wanted to work on.”
When they returned home, Sarah and her peers hosted and facilitated a gathering for high school students from the Nelson-area to identify problems that they, as a group, wanted to work together on to help solve. One of the projects identified was the Keep Jumbo Wild initiative, in the news at the time for its efforts to protect southeast B.C.’s Jumbo Valley from development.
The learners raised money for the initiative. Then a number of them, with their educators, travelled to the Jumbo Valley and spent several days hiking its forests, slopes and meadows.
“I’ve used that facilitator training in different capacities over the years since,” Sarah says, “from either supporting someone who’s feeling very overwhelmed by their own personal big issues to just asking myself ‘what can I do today as a small thing to further some of these big issues that are concerning me?’ and bringing the issues down to a more personal, local level.”
Ceramics by Sarah Graeme, © Sarah Graeme
She says she can trace some of the questions she deals with today as an artist working in clay back to specific conversations she had in her SelfDesign days.
“That was my first articulation of those deeper questions — ‘Who am I? Where do I fit in here? What’s my journey in life?’” she says. “They have impacted my life and choices since then, and are still the deep questions of my life today. They’re articulated differently now but they’re essentially the same. ‘How can I minimize the environmental impacts of my work in ceramics? How can I be more thoughtful about using local materials as a settler person? What is my impact as an artist?’”
But what stands out most for Sarah from her three years with SelfDesign is how her experience there reignited her interest in learning.
“I found so much joy in learning again,” she says. “To have left a high school experience and to want to pursue more schooling — that was not something I had thought during school that I would want to do. SelfDesign really helped me find the things that I was deeply interested in in my life.”
Meet other SelfDesign learners, past and present
Meet other members of SelfDesign’s community, past and present
