Carly Slade ( she/her )

I have observed that there is impermanence to our lives spent in the buildings we inhabit, and I am frightened by the precarious nature of the working class. I think a lot about people and the spaces they occupy. I’m interested in spaces as both an archive and a façade. Manmade structures, be it a skyscraper or the cab of a work truck, are vessels. They hold within them residue of the lives that have passed through them, while their outsides are reflections of their time and place. Each brick of a home was placed by someone’s hands, the foundation poured by a crew, porch lights glow from the effort of an electrician. Once a structure is built it becomes like a book with blank pages, ready to be marked and altered to document its history. The front banister was bent when the second owner backed his car into it. The ornate moulding around the front door is original to the home, covered with eight layers of paint, it’s now out of place now in its rundown neighbourhood. But it hints back to a time when the houses were new, the jobs were union, and the hope was palpable.

I understand the buildings in the city I grew up in, and I could probably interpret the ones in Alberta. But when I left Alberta, I became an observer. The USA has a history that I know the basics of, but there is much more regional history I’m missing. As I move across the States, I use the buildings like markers which I try to interpret. I’m an outsider looking in, trying to understand the area’s social and economic constructs. Yellow lawns in California signaled drought, seemingly countless Mexican restaurants spoke of colonization and immigration. Montana was all sky, dotted with the occasional wood paneled corner bar. Kansas was divided down political lines, Dems in the city, Republicans in the country. Philadelphia was covered in garbage, and the roads muddled with potholes. Signs of a large city in poverty with failing public service. A choice made by a few to focus on the wants of small faction over the greater good. Its visually the most aggressive city I’ve lived in. But if you look up the cornices crowning the rowhouses you’ll see that the city was once booming. It was once a manufacturing hub. As you walk past them you can imagine what life was like before the corner store was shuttered, back when there wasn’t boarded up homes and empty lots. In Philly’s architecture I read hope and resilience. In its people I felt pride, kinship, and an attitude of DIY urbanism. From where I sat each night on my old worn marble stoop, I saw the signs of gentrification creeping towards me. Those empty lots are beginning to fill with new homes for new families to make their own mark, but I wondered at what cost?

Carly Slade is a Canadian Ceramic Artist who grew up in “big sky” Alberta where she spent her early working life in the trades, from carpentry to concrete she is most at home in a shop. Her work is influenced by her blue-collar roots and plagued by a concern for the precarious nature of the working class. Using a mixture of materials from ceramic to embroidery, to industrial building supplies, Slade recreates dioramas of real world places using a candid perspective

Slade received her BFA in Ceramics from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2010), and her MFA in Spatial Arts from San Jose State University (2016). Her work has been exhibited throughout Canada and the United States. Slade has taught at Universities across Canada and the USA including the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Arizona State University in Phoenix. Slade has received several awards including being selected as an Emerging Artist as well as receiving the Helene Zucker Seeman Emerging Artist Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). She has received two grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and was awarded “Best in Show” for her piece in the show Fahrenheit 2024 at the American Museum of Ceramic Arts in Pomona, CA. Slade has participated in residencies at The Archie Bray Foundation, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, and Medalta International Artists in Residence. Slade has presented at symposiums, conferences and workshops around the world including NCECA in Sacramento, CA, USA, Chula Clay & Culture International Ceramic Symposium, in Bangkok, Thailand, and The New Clay Conference in Ottawa, ON, Canada. Her work has been shown in many group and solo shows internationally. Slade’s work can be found in the collections of Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand), Archie Bray Foundations for the Ceramic Arts (Helena, MT, USA), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS, USA), and The Clay Studio (Philadelphia, PA, USA).