Joyce Wieland: I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

 Joyce Wieland :  I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

Joyce Wieland  (1930-1998) is considered to be one of Canada's most prominent and prolific artists. 

The youngest of three children, she was born in Toronto, Canada to English emigrants who died when Joyce was quite young.  Brought up by her siblings, she attended high school at Central Tech in Toronto and was mentored by artist Doris McCarthy, who taught there.  She began her work career in film animation and met artist Michael Snow, marrying him when she was 26.  In 1960, (age 30) and then again in 1962, she had solo shows in two separate Toronto commercial galleries.  1962 is also the year that she and Michael moved to New York and lived there for nine years.  While in the USA, she became more aware of politics and of her deep love for  her home country, Canada.  When Pierre Elliot Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, she celebrated that by giving him a bed sized quilt, inspired by his mantra, Reason Over Passion.  Read more information about this two part piece that mixes the personal and the political at this link.   Wieland and Snow moved back to Canada in 1971 in time for her to mount her solo exhibition, "True Patriot Love" at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition included quilts and paintings, most about the fragile arctic and expressing a deep love for Canada.  Joyce's older sister Joan Stewart along with friends and volunteers joined with Joyce to sew the quilts she designed for this ground-breaking exhibition.  

I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada    cloth, thread, batting, metal.  Joan Stewart did the quilting and the embroidery.        1970   collection of Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada. 

"Wieland believed that Canada had to extricate itself from US encroachment.  Subverting the myth of a peaceful, tolerant, caring, and just Canada, the small embroidered letters in the middle read:  "Death to U.S. Technological Imperialism" in both official languages.   Wieland's progressive vision of Canadian society saw anglophones and francophones reconciled.  she declared in a 1971 New York Times article "I'm a Canadian.  I believe in Canada.  We should work for Canadian unity - English and French - as Canadians, not as anti-Americans.  We should be more positive about ourselves."

Joyce Wieland is being honoured by a full career retrospective in 2025.  It showed in Montreal in the first half of the year and in Toronto at the art gallery of Ontario in the second half.  There is a catalogue available entitled Heart On.  

Number 4 of Canadian Artists Who Work With Textiles  

Anna Wagner Ott

Shield:  threads, yarns, tyvek, acrylic paint  31 x 36 inches 2023  

Unfurling:  tyvek, yarn, thread, masking tape, acrylic paint
48 x 24 inches  2024

Anna Wagner Ott

Anna was born in England and emigrated to Canada at an early age.  Her art education includes degrees from University of Toronto and University of Alberta and a PHD in art education from Penn State.  She taught art at California State University from 2000 - 2013.  Her work has been displayed in multiple solo and group exhibitions. Her studio was in Barry's Bay, near Ottawa, Canada.  She was a prolific maker and showed her work as well as the process of creating it almost daily on the social media platforms of facebook and instagram.  She was a constant participant in international exhibitions such as Canada's World of Threads.  Anna Wagner Ott passed away suddenly and quietly on Christmas Eve 2024, a great loss to so many who had come to love her through her work.

"In the process of creating, I endeavor to connect with the pain of loss and insecurity, the act of concealing truths, the inherent vulnerability of life and death, and the inevitable process of disintegration and impermanence.  Yet, I also seek to capture the sparks of beauty that often emerge with the transitions and fading away.  My art serves as a continuous effort to piece together fragments of my own experiences, sometimes building up my weavings, and at other times deconstructing them - a symbolic reconstruction of my psyche, a continual process of destruction and reclamation of myself."

Her daughters wrote on Instagram:  "Anna was a true artist.  Art wasn't just what she did, it was who she was.  While she was also a devoted wife of 55 years, a loving mother to her children, an Oma to her 7 grandchildren, a sister, an aunt, and a friend, her life's purpose was clear, she was here to be an artist.  Her death was unexpected and we are still processing its suddenness."  

Because of the internet, there are many places that we can view her work and listen to her voice.  Two good ones are her own website, Anna Wagner-OTT and the fibre arts take two interview from 2022. 

number 3 of Canadian Artists who work with Textiles

Loving Red:  yarn and wax, 4 feet wide, 5 feet tall  2022 by Anna Wagner OTT

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  

Frances Dorsey: Shot Through The Heart

Frances Dorsey

When Frances Dorsey was seven to ten years old, she lived in Saigon, Viet Nam.   She remembers "a paradise on the edge of conflagration".  When she was twenty-one, she moved to Canada.  She has a duel citizenship with USA.  "I am a citizen of North America."

This piece, Shot Through the Heart, is made from used table linens that have been naturally dyed with extracts and earth oxides, as well as discharged and immersion dyed with mechanical resists.  Some have been  over printed with silk screen and also with block printing. The linens were cut up and reassembled.  They were embroidered hand stitched.  It is a large piece:  11 feet x 11 feet.  It was made in 2010. 

Suzanne Smith Arney saw this piece at a conference in Nebraska in 2010, and wrote about it in the fall 2011 of the Surface Design Association's journal.

"The napkins and tablecloths are soft with age and use.  Looking closely, I can make out a nine-block structure, with those blocks subdivided into four.  Each discovery revealed another level to decipher.  Stepping closer, I read the fabrics' histories written in monograms, embroidery, as well as small tears and stains.  Dorsey added her own text in faded yellow, red and purple dyes.  There are folds and stitchings and photo -derived images of her father's army photos and letters, such as b-52s and mortars.  I read the title and stepped back.  Shot Through the Heart infuses the room with a chilly clarity; the whole and partial circles are no more suns than dinner plates.  They are targets."

Frances Dorsey taught about textiles at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for sixteen years.  Her father was a rifleman "who relived his combat daily."    She currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and continues to make thoughtful and beautiful artwork with textiles.  

This is the first post about a new series on this blog:  

Canadian artists who work with Textiles