Pat and Selwyn Jones can boast something rare for a commercial vintner: they have quite possibly met every single person who has ever bought a bottle of their wine. In spite of requests from restaurants, and the convenience that retail sales would offer, they choose to sell their product in person at farmers’ markets and local events like the Denman Island Christmas Craft Fair, so they can ensure that all their clients know where their wine comes from and how best to store and serve it.

This dedication to authenticity, quality and personal connection is what draws people to the Denman Craft Fair year after year, says Craft Fair Coordinator, Autumn White. “I’m excited that Pat and Selwyn, of Corlan Vineyards, will be selling their wines at the fair again this year – they’ve been a big hit since they started vending at the fair two years ago. Their wine exemplifies the Craft Fair’s values of small-scale, hand-made, local and sustainable.”
As well, this year the Jones will also take part in the event’s food fair, offering comfort food such as home-made soup and shepherd’s pie, all based on products from their farm.

The personal touch is important for Corlan’s wines, says Selwyn, because the wines do not contain potassium metabisulphite, a preservative used in most commercial wine, including many organic wines. This reflects the Jones’ commitment to purity.

“We want our wines to be completely natural,” says Pat. Some people have allergies to sulphites, or find them hard to digest, and many people simply prefer to avoid preservatives in food and drink.

However, without sulphites, wine needs to be drank within three days of opening to ensure quality. After that, it begins to oxidize, compromising its flavour.
“It’s best to open our wine when you have friends over,” says Selwyn. “We need to be able to explain this to our customers, so we need to have face-to-face sales. It’s also important to explain that the shelf life of the wine, if unopened, is great. It just gets better and better.”

Corlan produces four wines, sold under the label To Ewe Wines: Sandy Island White is made with Corlan’s estate grown Ortega, a cross between Muller-Thurgau and Seigerrebe, which produce a crisp aromatic wine with citrus overtones. Siegerrebe is another aromatic white which is a personal favourite of the winemakers.

Chrome Island Red features Marechal Foch grapes, a French-American hybrid which ripens dependably in our climate, and produces an inky red, which is aged in neutral barrels.
Blackberry dessert wine is Corlan’s only sweet wine, and a favourite on Denman Island, where blackberries grow abundantly.

“Our wines have a strong fruit flavour,” explains Pat. “This is because we don’t irrigate the vineyards. This also means we’re not depleting the groundwater, which is important for sustainability. There are parts of Europe where this is practiced. It gives the wine more flavour.”

Corlan is Denman Island’s only vineyard and winery. All the wines come from fruit (mostly Ortega and Marechal Foch grapes, and blackberries) grown on the sunny 10- acre certified organic farm, which also includes Clun Forest Sheep, three working border collies, a large flock of laying hens, a propagating greenhouse with nursery, and a tasting room.

Running a certified organic farm is labour intensive but the Joneses wouldn’t have it any other way. They love the work itself, the long days in the garden and vineyard, and the payoffs. “It gives you a tremendous feeling of independence. We produce most of our own food. We’re almost completely self-sufficient. And the biggest blessing is that we know what we are eating. We know it is chemical-free and healthy,” says Selwyn. Weekends find them at the Denman Farmers’ Market and the Qualicum Farmers’ Market, making those face-to-face sales. They are looking forward to the Denman Craft Fair, partly because it’s a magical and fun community event, but also because the sales are brisk.

“The Fair is great for us,” says Pat. “We get people coming back each year. Wine makes a great gift.”

Busy though they are during the Fair, Pat and Selwyn also find time to do their holiday shopping on site. “It’s such an easy, nice place to buy presents, without having to go into stores at this time of year,” says Pat. Just like their clients, they love the face-to- face exchange of hand-made, high-quality, sustainable products.

Originally published in The Island Word, November 2017 photos by Colby Rex O’Neill

A visit to the back rooms of master potter Gordon Hutchens’ studio is like a trip to a magician’s lair. Surrounded by the mossy, moody grandeur of Denman Island’s Douglas Fir forest, the studio is a jam-packed jumble of rooms, full of potions and powders, bottles and tubs, tiny tools, big machines, and hundreds of vases, mugs, bowls, and other pieces, all at various stages of production.

As Hutchens prepares for craft fair season, he takes a short break to show me around, allowing me an intimate peek behind the curtain of one of BC’s most celebrated potters. We start in the front room – an immaculately clean, elegantly-lit gallery showcasing the graceful shapes and magnificent surfaces of Hutchens’ pottery. This where his creations work their magic, engendering awe and wonder in visitors. I get very quiet for a while, taking everything in, and then I start with the questions: “How do you do this? How do you get these textures, this luminosity, this velvet iridescence, this metallic sheen that glimmers and shifts and plays with light, as if the glaze is alive? ”

The answer to such questions involves a combination of craftsmanship, creativity, advanced chemistry, hard work, and a certain mad-scientist, inspired-alchemist enthusiasm that has animated Hutchens for over 45 years.

“It really is a bit like alchemy,” he says. “Both disciplines are about the transmutation of minerals and metals. You take a pinch of this and pinch of that, add high heat, and transformation happens.”

As he speaks, Hutchens gestures to a wall-sized chest of multiple small drawers, each labelled with names such as Nepheline Syenite, Lithium Carbonate, and Stannis Chloride. He points out shelves crowded with bottles and jars of Titanium Oxide, Fluorspar, Spodumene, Magnesium Carbonate, Black Copper Oxide, and dozens of other substances. He reaches up to take a small brown bottle and shows it to me.

“This is of Aquaregia, which means royal water. It will dissolve gold! That’s what I use to make some of the golds you see, for instance in the centre of a plate or the lip of a vase.”

Up ahead is a room full of tubs, ranging from tiny yogurt containers to big garbage bins – dozens, maybe hundreds of them, stacked up on shelves, counters, and on each other. These are all full of glazes, each unique, offering nuances of colour, texture and shine.

Beyond that is the clay mixing room, the most industrial-looking space in the studio. Although many potters buy ready-made clay, Hutchens blends his own so as to have total control over its qualities. This an arduous process involving finding the best ingredients from around the world (English Kaolin from Cornwall, Denman clay…. ,) making his own recipes, loading all the ingredients into a big mixing machine, transferring the result into a pug mill (another big machine) for fine mixing, extruding the final product out of the pug mill, and storing it until use.

Moving deeper into the studio, Hutchens points out his two wheels, one for porcelain and one for iron-bearing clay. He shows me shelves of glazed work, ready to be fired, and talks me through a new technique he’s developing – using silk screened patterning to apply glaze, in order to reproduce the look of antique Japanese fabric patterns.

Leaving the work area behind, Hutchens takes me into the gallery and points out several globular vases that appear encrusted with colour and texture, like an artifact from the earth, or perhaps from outer space.

“With these pieces I’m trying to capture the feel of other worlds; I think of these as the imaginary other moons of Jupiter, out beyond Io and Europa and all the others. I’m experimenting with amalgamating different techniques: Denman lustre [a glaze based on high-metal-content clay from his own property], textural slips, and crystalline patterns. Look at this crawling textural pattern – that where it looks cracked, like mudflats or alligator skin; it’s overlayed on top of a colourful slip so when it crawls it reveals the colour beneath it.”

Whoa! Clearly, there’s a lot going on in a Hutchens piece. And probably the most crucial part of the process is one I don’t see in the studio tour: the firing. Hutchens uses a variety of kilns and techniques such as salt firing, Taku, and reduction firing, But he is perhaps best known for his Anugama wood-fired kiln, built in 1998 under the guidance of world master Yukio Yamamoto.

This kiln is fired up twice a year and the event is equal parts ritual, work marathon, and social gathering. For three days the kiln has to fed every ten minutes with firewood. Participants work round the clock on a rota system. When the kiln finally cools and is opened, the results, if all has gone well, are stunning. Each piece tells its own story of how it was caressed by the flame and wood ash.

Potters come from all over Vancouver Island to fire their work in the kiln and help keep the kiln loaded. The event has a celebratory feel, as accomplished artisans enjoy the opportunity to be together, to mentor younger artists, and to create new, exciting work.

Hutchens has been a leader in his field for years. He has has over 25 one-man shows and over 70 group exhibitions across Canada and the US, with three major exhibitions in Japan, taught many courses and workshops, authored educational videos, and written articles for ceramics magazines and books. Yet he is nowhere near complacent, let alone bored. Pottery continues to excite him and entice him with possibility.

“There are so many things I haven’t had a chance to experiment with. That’s why I love this art form,” he says. “I studied all the visual arts at university. I could have become a painter or sculptor. But what sucked me into clay is that ceramics is the most complex of the arts. It includes all the visual art disciplines, and more: it’s about three-dimensional form, line and form, colour, chemistry, and mineralogy, and to top it off, you get to play with fire!” he says.

Hutchens has been exhibiting at the Denman Craft Fair since the event’s inception 36 years ago. “The Island really puts on a top-notch show. There is the same quality and diversity as in the big shows I do in Vancouver and Victoria. At the same time, it very much feels like a neighbourhood event.”

Originally published in the Comox Valley Record, December 2016

Photos by Fireweed

The locavore movement brought us the term “farm to table,” which points to the many benefits environmental, social, culinary, and economic – of eating food from local sources. The Denman Island Christmas Craft Fair has plenty of local food products to take home or eat on-site, but it goes much, much further: alongside the home-grown yummies we find clothing, jewelry, baskets, soaps, salves, toys, and more, all originating from Denman Island farms.

It’s time to coin a new term: “farm to home.” And the Denman Island Craft Fair can show us how this is done.

Fabric artist Barbara Pryl (known to her friends as Basia, pronounced Bah-sha) is one of Denman’s “farm to home” rising stars. The starting point for most of Basia’s gorgeous knitted, crocheted and woven creations is her flock of sheep, which graze her farm on Northwest Road. The back-story of her hats, mittens, and scarves includes the many hours she spends tending her flock and shearing, washing, carding, dying, and spinning their wool. That stylish shawl or those funky fingerless gloves you’ll see at Basia’s craft fair table trace their existence back to the Denman soil and water that keep her sheep happy and healthy.

Basia traces her love of working with wool back to her roots in Poland: “During World War II my Grandmother used to knit and crochet shawls and sell them on the streets in Warsaw just to survive. She had to walk 20 kilometres a day just to get there and back. During the occupation my family moved from Warsaw to a small town. I was born there. I started learning about wool from early childhood. One of my aunts taught me knitting; another taught me crochet.”

At five years old, Basia was crocheting tiny dresses, hats and even, she remembers, umbrellas for her dolls. She loved it, and as she grew up, her fascination grew. However, she didn’t find the chance to explore the full spectrum of yarn arts till she moved to Denman Island six years ago.

“I’ve been dreaming about spinning since I was 14, but never got the chance to even touch a spinning wheel till I moved here. I had to move to Denman to make my dreams come true.”

Once on Denman, Basia found a community of mentors, teachers and supporters in Denman Island’s extensive community of fabric artists. “There’s so much talent here to learn from. And people are so generous. All you need to do is ask,” she says.

Basia says that fulfilling her childhood dream has been every bit as wonderful as she hoped. In the past four years, she has learned a host of skills for taking wool along the “farm to home” journey.

“It’s a very long process that connects you to the seasons of the year. In late Spring, there’s shearing. In the summer, there’s washing because you need the heat to dry the wool, in the winter when it’s time to stay indoors you spin and knit. I love that you can start with a pile of dirty fleece and transform it into something beautiful,” says Basia.

Basia’s pieces vary in texture, colour and pattern. “No two pieces are the same,” she says. As well as pure wool from her own farm, she uses silk to add light, colour and texture, Buffalo wool for its softness and strength, and acrylic for headbands to avoid itchiness.

Originally published in The Denman Island Flagstone, December, 2016

photos by Fireweed