Studio Rally

On the first weekend in October, Nova Scotia artists and artisans throw open their studio doors, and locals and tourists alike, Studio Rally maps in hand, hit the highways and byways to pay a few calls. In 1992, Adriane Abbott, a Halifax textile artist, and Beverly McClare, a Grand Pré basketmaker, developed Studio Rally to help art and craft makers to sell their works. Since then it has been an exciting year-round part of Nova Scotia cultural life.

In Studio Rally: Art and Craft of Nova Scotia, Robin Metcalfe takes his own journey through the art and craft landscape of Nova Scotia, introducing 52 of the province's artists and craftspeople and their highly professional yet dramatically different works. He recounts his visits to artists as varied as folk carvers Bradford and Ransford Naugler, painter Alan Bateman, and ceramicist Zoppo's silk-weaving cabin-studio in Cape Breton. Colour portraits of the people and their works by Julian Beveridge, David Duncan Livingston, and other expert art photographers make Studio Rally a sumptuous overview of a cultural scene that's as full of beauty and surprise as the natural world.

Robin Metcalfe has a prenatal affinity for Nova Scotia crafts — his mother met his father while she was teaching weaving in Glace Bay. Like most of the people profiled in Studio Rally, he is a self-employed cultural producer: a freelance writer and independent curator.