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For Moose Jaw potter, sculptor, and painter Dorothy Yakiwchuk (née Elias), clay has always been more than material. It’s been a language — one spoken through form, memory, and the occasional multimedia project.
Yakiwchuk’s final exhibition at the Moose Jaw Centre for Arts & Culture (MJCAC), titled Inspiration in Clay: 52 Years of Ceramics, opened Saturday and draws on a lifetime of global influence, artistic evolution, and personal storytelling. Each piece carries a thread of biography: a sunflower from her childhood in Manitoba, a violin in homage to both her musical training and an abstract sculpture glimpsed overseas, and a new work built with friends from the local pottery club — a former home studio she's now returned to.
“I was thinking about what made me stay for 52 years with clay,” she said at the opening. “And I realized it was inspiration. Inspiration from different places, different people, different countries. My children live overseas, and I’ve been very lucky to spend time with them — not on a tour bus, but living life. That kind of experience settles into your bones, and then it finds its way into the work.”
Yakiwchuk was born in Winkler, Manitoba, and was inspired by Doris Shoemaker to begin throwing pottery under the guidance of Randy Woolsey at Fort Qu’Appelle’s Fort San Art School. She would go on to teach, exhibit internationally, and co-found the Mud Pie Girls with Kathy Verbeke during her time at the Moose Jaw Cultural Centre, now the Centre for Arts & Culture. Some of her individual sculptures have travelled with Rotary exchange students across five continents, and her work has appeared in juried shows across the Prairies.
Paintings by Yakiwchuk are featured along with the pottery that is the main focus for this show.
“My sunflower painting is called Blumenfeld. That means ‘flower field’ in German,” she said. “That’s my first language, actually. The sunflower is one of my favourite flowers. I was born where the fields were full of them.”
Her show includes a wide range of hand-built, wheel-thrown, and altered clay works — many of which also incorporate unexpected textures and materials. Once Upon a Tree, for example, blends wheel-thrown form with artificial branches from a local craft store.
“It doesn’t look like it was thrown, but it was,” she said. “Then I moulded and painted it, and I thought, let’s try mixing things. Let’s see what people think. Maybe someone will realize clay doesn’t have to live in its own little box.”
Yakiwchuk also credited the Moose Jaw Pottery Club for helping her complete the piece.
“I was working in the studio with them, and it just felt right to include them,” she said. “You get that shared sense of craft. That old-school feeling that it’s okay to take your time and build something meaningful together.”
While this show marks her final exhibition at the MJCAC, Yakiwchuk’s practice isn’t ending — it’s simply evolving.
“We’re always changing, right? That’s the thing about clay. It’s never really done until it’s fired — and even then, it keeps surprising you.”
Inspiration in Clay runs at the Moose Jaw Centre for Arts & Culture through July. Visitors can also view a short history of Yakiwchuk’s international exhibition work.