Janice Wright Cheney: Widow

Janice Wright Cheney

Janet Wright Cheney's life-sized bear, Widow, is armoured nose to paw in felted woollen roses and a velvet hide.  She is beautiful, but strangely so.  She even seems aware of her strangeness, questioning - how did this come to be?  It's partly in her posture.  She stands up on her hind quarters as bears do to sniff the air, seeking the lay of the land, puzzled.  She seems caught in an ongoing moment of self-bewilderment - an appropriate attitude for the grieving, for whom the balance of the whole world has shifted, making every day into a question.                                                                                                                                      The bear has a fairy-tale quality, connoting Sleeping Beauty, hidden behind a wall of roses.  But rather than a pre-adolescent waiting to be woken and learn the ways of an adult lover, this is an adult learning to live with the loss of her life partner.  As a widow-bear, the line is blurred between human and animal as fairy tales so often do, brothers metamorphosing into swans, frogs into princes, Wright Cheney's bear is implied to be living out a gendered grief, culturally ascribed, one that seems more human than animal.  Though on the other hand, grief is a wild emotion, one that may well turn us into some bearish version of ourselves.   read more of Sue Sinclair's review of Widow here  

The artist says:  "I saw a dead bear on the side of the highway, curled up like it was sleeping.  The sight of it filled me with a terrible sadness.  I thought, who mourns for this bear?  Who loved this bear?  My work Widow is the bear that is left behind, the bear that grieves.  This work explores the impossibility of reconciling love, and desire, with death.  So it had to be big:  it had to be a grizzly bear, because I wanted to express the enormity of grief." 

Janice Wright Cheney lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick where she continues to make art and also teaches at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design.    Click here to view her website. 

This is the second post of a new series on this blog.  

Canadian Artists who Work with Textiles