Bridget
Fairbank
      @bridgetfairabnk
​

Fix, Fire, Forge: The Art of the Technician

​

They cast the moulds. Fix the kilns. Keep the shop humming.
Yet, Alberta’s art technicians are also researchers and artists.

This exhibition reveals the double lives of the skilled technicians who support two of Alberta’s studio art programs—at Alberta University of the Arts and Red Deer Polytechnic. These are the quiet experts behind the scenes: the ones who fix broken tools, guide student projects, and maintain creative spaces.

​

Yet outside of work hours, they pursue their own rigorous studio practices. Sculpture, installation, jewellery, film, fibre; each object here is a glimpse into their personal research, humour, and material mastery.

Fix, Fire, Forge celebrates the technician as both mentor and maker. By pulling back the curtain, we honour the ethos of care, skill, and rebellion that defines their work—in and beyond the classroom.

​

​​

The Researcher’s Eye

Where do craft technicians get their ideas?

Beneath technical mastery simmers curiosity. The artists in this section draw on lived experience—wildfire patrols, welding shops, ceramic studios—to shape their creative investigations. Whether repeating forms in clay or salvaging steel from industrial sites, they approach making as a process of inquiry. Research, for them, happens not only in books or sketchpads, but through risk, repetition, and discovery in the studio.

​

​

Bridget Fairbank
Calgary, AB
Educational Art Technician, Ceramics, AUArts

There is a density to the nature of things...(2026)
Ceramic
$5,000

​

Fairbank builds installations like a potter throwing in series; one form leads to the next. Her practice blends craft discipline with open-ended experimentation, where failure is part of the process. In this assembled field of fragments, forms are repeated, edited, and layered in pursuit of a quiet, evolving logic. For Fairbank, the studio is autonomous terrain, where risk becomes research, and play becomes progress.

 

Selené Huff
Red Deer, AB
Visual Arts Technician, Red Deer Polytechnic

Entanglement (2023–2025)

Welded, fabricated, forged and found steel, concrete
$1,500

​

There are Worse Things (2022–2025)

Welded, forged, fabricated and found steel, concrete
$1,000

​

Trained as an aerospace welder, Huff brings exacting skill and lived material knowledge to her sculptural work. Drawing from Alberta’s industrial detritus, she fuses forging and fabrication with a deep interest in the body’s presence in form. These pieces are crafted through labour-intensive processes that reveal not only structural intelligence but also a tactile sensitivity to mass, gesture, and repair.

 

​

​

Material Mastery

Mastery is more than skill. 

It’s an intimate relationship with material; a dialogue built over years of practice. In this section, fibre, metal, and dye become languages spoken fluently. Artists work at the edge of precision, balancing tradition and experimentation.

Together, these works demonstrate not just technical excellence, but a deep commitment to process. In the hands of technicians, materials don’t merely behave—they argue, murmur, insist.

 

​

Jolie Bird
Calgary, AB
Fibre Technician, AUArts

Oddments of Exploration (2025)

Cotton yarn, linen fabric, found indigo-dyed kimono cloth, dye, discharge, indigo and potassium permanganate.
127x116x2.5
Calgary, AB
nfs

​

Hand-dyed and composed with care, Oddments of Exploration reflects Bird’s intuitive precision. Drawing on traditional fibre processes, she assembles layered fragments into quiet visual conversations. As both artist and technician, she works between control and curiosity, building each piece slowly, through methods that demand patience, repetition, and close attention to detail.

 

Into the Void #2 (2025)

Ramie yarn, indigo, iron, logwood & discharge
127 × 116 × 2.5 cm
Jolie Bird (Fibre Technician, AUArts)
Calgary, AB
nfs

​

This work distills a slow, layered process into a single arresting visual gesture. Built with traditional dyeing methods and handwoven ramie, it hums with precision, a testament to control earned over time. As a technician, Bird is attuned to every stage of the making process. Her practice honours the patience, repetition, and care required to move fibre from function to contemplation.

 

Brett Hollingsworth

Jewellery & Metals Technician, AUArts
Calgary, AB

The Twinkler (2025)
Sterling silver, A2869 (large gemstone), Jax Black, lighter components
7.1 × 4.9 × 1.1 cm
nfs

​

A 1980s Version of a 1920s Design in the 21st Century (2025)
Sterling silver, E116 (large gemstone), nail polish
7.4 × 5 × 1.5 cm
nfs

​

Impending Doom…or not?! (2025)
Sterling silver, ANZ-1536 (large gemstone), cubic zirconia, Jax Black
7.3 × 5 × 1.2 cm
nfs

 

Formally precise and playfully referential, these small-scale works reflect the breadth of Brett Hollingsworth’s expertise as a hand engraver, metalsmith, and object fabricator. Each piece merges fine jewellery technique with unexpected materials—nail polish, lighter parts, humour—and reimagines function through ornament.

Drawing on both historical forms and contemporary tools, Hollingsworth treats the miniature object as a site of innovation, craftsmanship, and wit. These works are as much engineered as they are designed.

Work supported by the Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA).

 

​

The Thread of Rebellion

Craft has never been neutral. 

Every material, every method, carries a history: of use, of value, of who gets to make what, and why. The works in this section pull at those threads with sharp tools, rough edges, and a weaponized wit. Each piece challenges the idea that craft must be polite, precious, or apolitical.

This is rebellion by hand: a reworking of form, function, and expectation. These artists borrow from furniture, fashion, signage, and pop culture to provoke. Their work is intelligent, irreverent, and fully aware of the systems it’s poking holes in.

Here, care is charged. 

 

​

warning: surf’s up, sun’s down (2018)

Reclaimed lumber, stain, paint
175 × 81 × 6 cm
Logan Lape (Sculpture Technician, AUArts)
Edmonton, AB
nfs

​

Equal parts sign, sketch, and slogan, this wall piece plays with urgency and ambiguity. Made from salvaged wood and painted by hand, it echoes the language of protest placards or roadside warnings, but without resolution. Lape often works with provisional materials in unconventional places. His objects feel both tossed-off and pointed, questioning what counts as a message, and who’s meant to receive it.

 

High Tide (2019–2026)

Aluminum, webbed folding beach chair, vinyl, thread, EPS foam
170 × 184 × 62 cm
Logan Lape (Sculpture Technician, AUArts)
Calgary, AB
On loan from the collection of N. Klawuahboe & L. Shordee
nfs

​

A lawn chair balances atop a stylized white swell, part monument, part cartoon. Lape, a sculpture technician and artist working between formal training and DIY strategies, often stages work in backyards, trailers, or parking lots. Here, he pairs humour with tension—a summer object made absurd by scale and context. High Tide quietly asks what rises, what recedes, and who’s watching from the chair.

 

William, László, Karel (Left to Right, 2025)

Photogenic drawings on silver gelatin paper
12 × 10 cm each (framed)
Kyle Whitehead
Calgary, AB
$600

​

Whitehead uses early photographic techniques to create hand-developed images that blur the line between experiment and artifact. These works are cameraless contact prints: made with light, time, and a willingness to let materials lead. Like a potter firing blind or a metalworker chasing patina, his process resists perfection in favour of accident and risk. Rooted in material knowledge and rebellion against digital speed, these images sit comfortably within craft’s evolving definitions—tactile, thoughtful, and deeply time-based.

 

Goldenrod + Yarrow (2023)

Ceramic, glue, wood
60 × 46 × 30 cm
Bridget Fairbank (Ceramics Technician, AUArts)
Calgary, AB
$1000 each

​

These botanical forms don’t aim for beauty alone; they carry the weight of observation. Drawing from her background in environmental monitoring, Fairbank fuses studio process with field knowledge. Goldenrod and yarrow, long valued as wild medicines, are here translated into ceramic gestures that are grounded, persistent, and generous. Fired clay and salvaged wood become small monuments to care, place, and ecological memory.

 

Ode to Wood (2026)

Ceramic, reclaimed wood
Each panel: 53.34 × 90.8 × 11.5 cm
Total configuration: 106.68 × 272.4 × 11.5 cm
Bridget Fairbank (Ceramics Technician, AUArts)
Calgary, AB

$2550 (panels may also be purchased in pairs)

A decade of wildfire-spotting shaped Fairbank’s relationship with land, time, and attention. In Ode to Wood, she casts and glazes fragments of scavenged lumber—transforming burnable, discarded material into a lasting record. Each ceramic panel is laboured and luminous, echoing the logic of tiling, but resisting containment. This is a quiet protest: against waste, against erasure, and for the messy intelligence of natural systems and hand-making.

 

Nate McLeod (Studio Operations Manager, AUArts)
Calgary, AB

Twelve Shapes No. 1 (2026)

Reclaimed clay on salvaged wood
76.2 × 50.8 × 12.7 cm
nfs

​

Twelve small vessels rest in a handmade display, each a unique pinch-formed variation. Like a painter arranging still-life objects, McLeod treats these forms as subjects, repeating, shifting, and refining. The installation reads like a study or an archive, drawing the viewer’s eye to quiet variations and material irregularities. Clay becomes both sketch and sculpture: a painter’s experiment in dimensional form.

 

Twelve Shapes No. 2 (2026)

Acryla gouache and clay slip on repurposed canvas
76.2 × 50.8 × 3.81 cm
nfs

This companion piece reproduces the same twelve forms, flattened and painted like a coded diagram or index. McLeod’s background in still life painting merges here with tactile materiality—an archive of shape and touch rendered in muted gouache and clay slip. Side by side, the two works suggest echo, memory, and translation across media: painting becomes an object; an object becomes an image.

 

 

I Love Lamp (2025–2026)

Porcelain, hardwood, light bulb, plug-in
Each approx. 27.94 × 15.24 × 15.24 cm
Tayler Shell
Red Deer, AB
$260 each

​

Shell turns the familiar glow of a bedside lamp into a ceramic experiment—glazed, imperfect, luminous, and a little absurd. Drawing on studio pottery, design history, and pop culture references, she remakes a functional object by hand five times over. Each lamp is slightly off, lovingly awkward. Together, they question what counts as refined, as useful, as desirable—and whether the answer should be taken seriously at all.

 

Jane Trash

Educational Art Technician, Print Media, AUArts
Calgary, AB

Human Serviette (2025)
Discarded intaglio press blankets, felt sizing catchers
147 × 61 × 4 cm
nfs

​

Sewn from salvaged intaglio press blankets, this jumpsuit is part uniform, part armour. “Human Serviette” presents the body as both a site and a sponge—marked, imprinted, and ready to work. For Trash, the material isn’t just a surface—it’s a record of use, a residue of studio labour. This piece collapses boundaries between the artist, the printshop, and the mess of making.

 

Thanks for reaching out (2023)

Reticulated foam, acrylic paint, rubber cement
142 × 79 × 10 cm
nfs

​

This enormous foam finger raises a single, foam-digit salute—less cheer, more critique. Poking at the language of late-capitalist positivity, Trash wields absurdity like a weapon. Equal parts humour and howl, this work refuses platitudes, cutting through politeness with an exasperated gesture that speaks for itself.

 

​

Archive as Remix

What happens when artists revisit, replicate, or reframe the past? 

In this section, technicians become archivists—resampling personal histories, formal studies, and everyday aesthetics into something newly resonant.

Craft artists frequently draw from the vocabulary of domestic life—vessels, still life, display—but distort and rearrange it. Their works blur boundaries between image and object, study and final form. 

These works flatten time and shift context. They aren’t archives of finished products, but evolving practices in which repetition, material remixing, and reinterpretation keep the past in motion.

 

Dara Humniski
Educational Art Technician (AuArts)
Calgary, AB

Five Studies (2008–2024)
Porcelain, stoneware, wood, acrylic, ink
Various dimensions
nfs

​

This installation reframes a series of prototypes and small vessels—created across a practice—as a single, considered installation. Gathered in proximity, the vessels converse across time and function, an evolving syntax of form. Through shifts in scale, material, and function, the collection becomes a remix of recurring ideas: memory, domesticity, and the poetic potential of form.

 

Prairie House vase (prototype) (2008)
Slip cast porcelain
16 × 18 × 18 cm
nfs

​

A house emerges from the surface of this porcelain block—silent, solitary, and slightly surreal. Humniski plays with proportion and presence, inviting foliage to transform the domestic into the uncanny. It’s vase and model, vessel and memory.

 

Brutalist vase (2024)
Stoneware
18 × 20 × 19.5 cm
nfs

​

Grid meets curve in this stoneware sculpture, evoking architectural forms more than floral ones. The open structure functions as both a crown and a cage—offering a place for arrangement or an obstacle to it. A vase that resists its own use.

 

Proxy vase (2021)
Acrylic tube, fountain pen ink, maple hardwood
9 × 12.5 × 12.5 cm
nfs

​

What stands in for the real? With ink and wood in place of water and clear acrylic replacing ceramic, this piece gestures toward function while remaining oddly aloof. It’s a stand-in for the symbolic, opaque in meaning, transparent in form.

 

Lilac vase (2022)
Stoneware
9.5 × 8.5 × 8.5 cm
Dara Humniski
Edmonton, AB
nfs

​

This minimalist double-bowl form suggests both bloom and container. It nods to the familiar shapes of thrown pottery but interrupts the silhouette just enough to feel uncanny—a quiet vessel for a quiet gesture.

 

Wood vase study (2022)
Black walnut, hardwax oil
7 × 2.5 × 2.5 cm
nfs

​

A single carved shape, smaller than a hand and precise in its simplicity. Humniski treats this miniature as a complete thought—solid, playful, and suggestive of ritual or play.