Garden Secrets

Provenance:
Private Collection, Vancouver

Literature:
Victor Cicansky, http://www.cicansky.ca/community/index.htm, accessed August 13, 2014
Notes:
While studying at the University of Saskatchewan, Victor Cicansky became interested in ceramics, gravitating to classes with teachers Beth Hone and Jack Sures. In the late 1960s, Regina ceramicists were aware of an eccentric group of Californian ceramic sculptors - a movement known as Funk - which worked to raise the ceramic medium above the utilitarian. Cicansky was receptive to their innovations, and he met Funk ceramicists during a 1967 workshop in Maine and later at the University of California. Cicansky's work glorifies everyday objects and people, and his personal narratives weave through his imagery. He grew up in a large Romanian family in Regina's Garlic Flats and has vivid memories of tending the large garden his family planted. He recalls his grandmother, a skillful gardener, sitting cabbages and other vegetables on chairs beside the house. Cicansky stated, "My work is about the backyard garden. It's about what I have seen, what I have remembered, what I have dreamt about and experienced as a gardener." Richly coloured, fanciful, and exploding with the bounty of the earth, Garden Secrets is a classic Cicansky sculpture.