KENORA — Local potter Kiefer Floreal has been quite busy rising to the occasion on the CBC’s new pottery competition show, including a recent Potter of the Week decoration ahead of the series semifinals.
Since the start of February, Floreal has been comporting on The Great Canadian Pottery Throwdown, which is a Canadian adaptation of a popular show that's aired in the United States, United Kingdom and beyond. Each week, potters compete against each other in both special competitions and shorter "throw-downs" meant to ratchet up the pressure while racing against the clock.
Despite making it to the final four, Floreal - known by many in town for the beautiful work he creates under Kiefer Floreal Pottery - told the Miner and News he nearly gave up on the idea of competing before auditioning for the show.
“I was ready to quit. The first pot that I threw was at the auditions — first in three months," he said.
Hesitant and concerned about seeming vain for going on a TV show, Floreal explained that his grandfather eventually helped put things into a different perspective.
He told Floreal: “Don’t think of this as a vanity thing. Think of this as pushing your career forward and do it for all the people that have supported you throughout your journey. It's important for the community and for students to see that. What you make is of value.”
And Floreal has definitely proven that to be true. The competition’s judges, ceramic artists Natalie Wadell and Brendan Tang, have named him the winner of one mini challenge and one weekly challenge so far. His first place piece was a functioning lamp adorned with his original drawings, which he said was meant to speak to his identity.
Floreal’s incorporation of his drawings in his pottery has caught the judges' eye more than once over the course of the season. Tang noted that as a person of colour himself, he doesn’t often see racialized people in fantasy artwork like the way Floreal depicted Black people amongst dragons on his lamp.
His journey hasn't exactly been pain-free, though - before winning the weekly challenge in the series’ fourth episode, one of Floreal’s pots shattered in the firing process the week before. Coming back from that and winning was a pivotal moment for him, he said, and he credits judges Wadell and Tang for pushing him out of his comfort zone.
While making the aforementioned lamp, Floreal said he thought of his grandmother and drew from the heart. “It was all off the dial,” he said. “So that was such a such a triumph in my mind.”
The judges pick a winner for each episode’s main challenge, but in the end, they also have to send one of the contestants home. While Floreal’s lamp turned out to be both structurally sound and beautifully designed, Micheal Wood, his friend and a potter from New Brunswick, wasn’t so lucky, with a significant crack in his.
“The wins are overshadowed by the losses,” said Floreal about Wood leaving the show, “but it felt good to bring one home for Kenora.”
Floreal, who is 27 years old, was born in Kenora and went to school in the U.S. before eventually moving to Winnipeg. Kenora “definitely was home base,” he said, and growing up, he spent his summers there fishing with his uncle and grandfather.
Fishing is cathartic, and in that sense, it is similar to pottery, said Floreal, who often incorporates fish prints into his pieces.
"When you get a good result, it's so rewarding because nothing's promised,” he explained. “Clay is from the Earth, so pottery just seems so congruent with anything naturally inspired.”
By using a technique inspired by the Japanese, called gyotaku, Floreal presses the painted bodies of fish onto his pottery as a way of printing. In another episode, he left the judges impressed with a fish-printed serving tray despite it being cracked.
As someone from northwestern Ontario, as well as a Black man and as a former football player, Floreal knows he doesn’t exactly fit the mold of the stereotypical potter.
“Being a minority is hard,” he said, but there are so few potters in general that the community almost has to be tight-knit. “There's so much you can connect with just based on ‘I'm doing something no one understands,’” said Floreal. “I could talk to a Korean potter and other than the language barrier, we would have so much to talk about.”
If the potter community is small, the Black potter community is even smaller, so Floreal makes an effort to branch out and keep up with them through social media, he said.
While, thankfully, overt racism hasn’t been a part of Floreal’s decade-long journey as a potter, he has had to navigate ideas and others’ perceptions of him that are rooted in toxic masculinity.
“When you're a young man, if you're doing anything outside of sports or music or something like that, you're corny,” he explained. “We just don't want to do anything that can be possibly perceived as not cool.” But “I really do something because I enjoy doing it, regardless of what's going on,” said Floreal.
Since The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down aired, he’s been hosting viewing parties at Lake of the Woods Brewing Company and visiting schools across town.
“It feels good to make people proud, make people excited and put Kenora on the map a little bit.” Despite the show marking his location as Winnipeg, one of Floreal’s first creations for the show was an ashtray dedicated to Lake of the Woods.
Floreal wants to work in schools and with children who are interested in the arts more often in the future. “I just want to be there to be an avenue because I’m 27, and I'm still looking for guidance,” he said.
He wants those kids to know that their skills are useful and “of more value than you'll ever be able to process.”
The Great Canadian Pottery Thrown Down is available to stream for free on CBC Gem, and episode 7, titled "Calm Waters" will air as the beginning of the show's semifinals on March 29.
Kenora Miner and News / Local Journalism Initiative
