ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Catherine Druken is a multidisciplinary artist living on the unceded lands of the Narragansett and Wampanoag nations - Rhode Island. Her work is influenced by folk art, abundance, and the interconnectedness between humans and more-than-humans.

Zoë Wyner is a ceramicist whose 20+ year practice takes the form of a visual anchor. She currently resides in Providence, RI, but has lived in transience, moving from one address to another, for most of her life. In response to this condition, Wyner’s vessels are intended to evoke the intimacy of home. Wyner has studied various mediums that inform her practice at institutions including the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, the Art Institute of Boston, and Mudflat Studio. She has shown her work at World’s Fair Gallery, Aviary Gallery, and the Providence Art Club, among other locations. Wyner has taught at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the South County Art Association (SCAA), Anyhow Studio, and the Mosesian Center for the Arts.

Truth and Resistance

Francesca Colonia + Giulia Nicolai

For the past 10 years, Francesca Colonia and Giulia Nicolai have invited international artists to collaborate with them at BetterPress Lab, a unique letterpress studio located in Rome, Italy. Truth and Resistance will feature these collaborations.

THE BUTCHER [March 2024]

Visual Poetry, CERAMICS & KNIVES

KYLIE GELLATLY

Kylie Gellatly is a poet, visual artist, editor, critic, and the author of The Fever Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, Ninth Letter, Northwest Review, DIAGRAM, Poetry Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, and has been anthologized in After: A Collection of Contemporary Ekphrastic Writing & Art (forthcoming from GASHER Press, May 2024) and Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry (Green Writers Press, 2023). Her book reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Adroit Journal, Pleiades, Gulf Coast and Green Mountains Review. Her second full-length collection, BUTCHER, is currently out on submission.

Kylie earned her BA in English from Mount Holyoke College and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and the Juniper Writing Institute. She has been twice shortlisted for the Disquiet Prize, longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s New Voices Contest, and received Honorable Mention for the Gertrude Claytor Award of the Academy of American Poets. She currently serves as Managing Editor of Plant-Human Quarterly and Book Reviews Editor for Pleiades.

Silene DeCiucies, Dirt Floor Studios

“I see my work as a potter as an expression of my love for physical work and movement. Splitting wood, building structures, digging clay, stacking slabs of softwood and stoking the woodstove in the studio are all as integral to my process as making and firing the pots. Woodfiring provides a beautiful structure and rhythm for creating work, and I feel like my job as a potter is to let the components of the process (chiefly clay, wood, flame, and time) express themselves as a beautiful object for everyday use.

I make simple, functional forms and minimally decorate with a small variety of slips and glazes, letting the firing and reduction cooling process create subtle and stony surfaces that hopefully will make your everyday eating and drinking experience more pleasurable.”

Silene’s Background: Silene has been making pots for about 15 years and was lucky enough to work for 3 incredible female potters in central New York making production gas fired pots, salt fired pots, and reduction cooled pots. Silene then took those years of experience and moved back to her home town in Vermont and built her own small wood kiln that she has been firing ever since. Silene’s formal education is in soil and crop science and she has a deep love for dairy, so her time is shared between making pots, stacking wood, milking cows, growing grass, making cheese, and business consulting for dairy farms.

Chelsea Miller

Chelsea Miller is an artist and entrepreneur. She’s the owner of and creative force behind Chelsea Miller Knives, her lauded eponymous brand of bespoke hand-made culinary knives and her newest venture, The Knife Factory, an event space, production studio and showroom located in Brooklyn, New York. In a field dominated by men, she brings a distinct feminine sensibility to her craft and wields her hammer to a rhythm all her own.

Miller’s one of a kind rustic and elegant knives are made using recycled materials sourced from her family’s farm in rural Vermont; the blades forged from repurposed horse hoof rasps, the handles constructed from reclaimed wood including  maple, cherry, apple, and oak. 

Her unique designs and style have captured the attention of both home cooks and world renowned chefs and restaurateurs including Daniel Humm, Jean Georges Vongeritchten, Massimo Botura, Rachael Ray and Nancy Silverton, among others. The current waiting list for her knives is 12 months; her work has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg Business, Robb Report, Fast Company, Popular Mechanics, and Food & Wine among others.

Miller’s greatest joy is to foster community through food, design and learning; The Knife Factory is the manifestation of that joy and the next chapter of Chelsea Miller Knives. Located in a former factory building in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, the multi-purpose space, designed and built out by Miller herself, functions as a collaborative gathering place for public and private events, a production studio for photography and culinary content,  a classroom for learning and demonstrations, and  a pop-up space for chef dinners. It’s also the showroom for her knives and her new line of housewares, designed by Miller and hand-crafted by artisans in Morocco. 

Miller’s road to becoming a knife artisan and culinary entrepreneur was not a direct path. She moved to New York in 2001  with the intention of being an actor and was active in theater, film, music, and dance for several years. However,when her father became ill, she returned to Vermont to assist in his care during the last few years of his life.

A blacksmith and a carpenter, her father built houses and used horses to log the land. A critical part of the keeping of horses is being a farrier–one who tends their hooves and refreshes the iron horseshoes. A farrier’s rasp is an imposing tool, and it was while working with discarded rasps in her father’s workshop that Miller started making knives. “The materials I use have personal significance for me; sharing the significance with others is part of my story,” she explains. The serrated rasp surface is now considered one of the signature trademarks of a Chelsea Miller knife.

Miller returned to New York in 2012, set up a knife workshop and started selling her knives at the Brooklyn Flea, Brooklyn's largest flea market that features artisans, collectors, secondhand furniture purveyors, and a tightly curated group of culinary offerings.  “The Flea draws an incredible audience of chefs, writers, and restaurateurs,” explains Miller. “Once established at the Flea, my work got noticed, reviewed, and talked about.” And the rest, as they say, is history.

“I hope my knives will arouse curiosity while retaining

their simplicity, cutting one object into two, multiplying nutrients. The materials I use have personal significance for me, sharing the significance with others is part of my story. I hope my knives enrich relationships between family and friends and the food we prepare and share together.”

- Chelsea Miller

THE ARTIST ARCHIVE

OLIVE THE GIANT

NICK MCKNIGHT

OLIVE THE GIANT

Olive the Giant [Quinn Bryan] was born in Brooklyn and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. Quinn has a BA in Studio Art and Painting from Rhode Island College and works between her home studio in Pawtucket, RI and Boston, MA. 

 OLIVE THE GIANT on HEIRLOOM: 

 “HEIRLOOMS, LEGACY, FAMILY FIRST. This exhibition is especially close to me as I’ve been looking for inspiration everywhere– except right at home. My Uncle Glenn’s passing in 2020 was the end of an era. The era of mysterious men, the green berets and, “call me from a pay phone” promises of ‘no questions asked’ protection. Endless photo album unveilings and, “Who’s that’s” over old boxes of lost memories… I see my family but have I SEEN my family? Where have THEY been, what have THEY done? All of their dreams, beauty and secrets… It has taken me no time at all to get tangled, and I don’t want to be undone. I have a forever catalog of inspiration, I just had to look at my family first.” 

My series, DO NOT LITTER, is really a deconstructed cityscape. There’s something important about seeing and experiencing the *true view* of city life…The beauty, the cracks, the trash… I see beauty in everything, so I spotlight what lies beneath… What’s in my path. Each piece was inspired by a literal piece of trash that I’ve found during my walks. Each item brings on nostalgic memories from my childhood and family; a sense of identity… Each piece holds a feeling, or a time in space. II proudly present these articles as heirlooms, sacred and savored- lasting here and now in true still life.  

NICK MCKNIGHT

Nick grew up in New England and received a BFA in Fine Art from the University of Rhode Island. He has exhibited work throughout the U.S. and has work in collections around the world. Nick’s work has been published in print and online for both poetry and neon. He currently lives in Providence, RI with his wife and son and is the owner of Night Light Neon Studio. 

Nick McKnight on his craft:

“My neon work is rooted in my background in poetry and printmaking. Neon blends these practices in a concise and meditative process that allows me to question and express my lived experiences. Working in multiple mediums, I bend neon as an art form and an outlet, the process just as strong as the [conceptual] end product.”

FRITZ GLASS

Fritz Lauenstein started blowing glass in 1974 at Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine. He then attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont and the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. In 1984 Fritz and his partner June moved to the Cape, where his family is from, and opened Fritz Glass in 1991. The Fritz Glass studio is in Dennisport, MA.

WILLA VAN NOSTRAND is an interdisciplinary artist, curator & mixologist based in Providence, Rhode Island. She works across painting, sculpture, performance and taste to engage the associative realm of the viewer’s mind. Willa has a BA in Theatre and Visual art from Sarah Lawrence College and studied intaglio printmaking at il Bisonte in Florence, Italy. Her most recent fine art & culinary residency was in Sicily this fall where she had the opportunity to make a new body of work for AMORE AMARO. [March - April 2023]

ATHENA WITSCHER

ATHENA WITSCHER is an artist, youth educator and mother living and working in Providence, RI. With a BFA in ceramics from RISD, Athena works with clay to make functional objects for everyday use. Athena’s simple, expressive aesthetic reflects her Japanese heritage as taught to her by crafting with her mother and grandmother. [AMORE AMARO, March - April 2023]

Neal Drobnis

Glass artist Neal Drobnis started making glasses with faces in order to take a creative break and use glass remnants from around his studio. In 2018 he teamed up with DEGEN to create FACEVESSEL- a collection of face emblazoned glassware. The collaborative nature of the process, paired with the unpredictable outcomes, celebrates humanity and honors individuality.

FACEVESSELS are made with joy in Providence, RI.

[AMORE AMARO, March - April 2023]

the SHOW Archive…