it's a thing

Two Years Into Covid by Martin Kotyluk  2022 acrylic on canvas  (detail)

The pandemic.

It is a thing.  

To not mention it would be lying and I try to tell the truth here. 

Our lives have changed because of that pandemic.  

Our ways of being with other people have changed.  

(my baking got better, my introversion got worse)

Cabin Dream in the Big Muddy by Rob O'Flanagan 2020-2022 acrylic on linen (detail)

My eye doctor had to close her local office.  

Which meant that I had go into Sudbury for my check up.  

I have not been going anywhere other than to the mailbox so this was huge.

Ned came too.  It was his almost birthday and so we had a date.

(My distance vision got better, my myopia got worse.)

Sick and Tired by Andrew McPhail 2021 sequins on bedsheet

We went to two art exhibitions because they were there.  

Both exhibitions had a pandemic slant.

Pandemic Partners by Rita Vanderhooft 2021 photographic print on paper

Art Gallery of Sudbury:   "is this real life?"  

A juried exhibition with a wide variety of media including ceramics, glass, textiles, photography, sculpture and painting.  It was thought provoking.  It was interesting.  I found beauty too.

I recognized many of the names, I am friends with some of the artists.  

In The Shadows no 1 - 7  Trish Stenabaugh  2022  digital print on paper

Gallery 6500: (a new gallery that has popped up in the hallway of the steelworkers union office)

Also thought provoking, this exhibition was self organized by the 'peer mentors group' of artists and poets.  The loss of one of their members over the winter, Ray Laporte, may have been the trigger for this exhibition that was entitled  "Lost and Found".  

I am friends with some of the artists.

Lost Dreams  Elizabeth Holmes and Gunhild Hotte 2021 acrylic on canvas

I wanted you to know that all this is happening in Sudbury.

Art.  Poetry.  Loss.      

I'm changed because of our trip to the city.

I keep thinking about the art.  

Cabin Dream on the Big Muddy by Rob O Flanagan 

I'd almost stopped thinking about the pandemic, but it's a thing.  

It's a whirl.  

The Perspective From Here

Yesterday I parceled up three pieces for an exhibition in Thunder Bay of 150 artists from North Western Ontario.   Organized to celebrate Canada's 150th birthday, it opens June 23 at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.  I was invited to participate because I was born in that immense and isolated region of Ontario.

One of the pieces (shown above)  was in private collection and has been loaned back to me (and the Thunder Bay Gallery) for this exhibition.  As I packed it up, I enjoyed looking at, touching and remembering it.  

I love that the Thunder Bay Art Gallery considers me one of their regional artists, even though I moved to Manitoulin over 20 years ago.  Canada is a huge country and even though I am now only 6 hours drive time from Toronto instead of the 20 hours I grew up with, I still feel isolated.  (if that is possible these days with internet)

Beginning with Time is a response to Canada’s natural grandeur and rawness, specifically the beautiful and powerful rock cuts through Northern Ontario’s Cambrian shield and the tree covered cliffs of the inland fjords found in the Gros Morne area of Newfoundland.

I believe that the intimacy we have with domestic textiles and the tactile nature of cloth has a psychic power.

These 150th celebrations are focusing in on Canada's history - much of it in reference to reparation with the indigionous peoples who lived here before the Europeans.  My work is considering what it was like for the settlers who came.

Canada in its early days was a dangerous, cold, and lonely place for European women.  There must have been a longing for the more refined life and family left behind.  Yet I believe that those brave women must also have experienced deep wonder at the immensity and the natural raw beauty of Canada.  I feel that they must have looked at the sky a lot.

With my work, I strive to express our emotional and vulnerable inner world.  I believe this is what art does best.­

 Titles of all pieces are stitched into them.

Better images of the pieces are in my New Work blog.
My Light Green Heart.
Canadian Pioneer.
Beginning With Time.

The process and the materials in these three pieces tell a story of survival. 

To Not Be So Lonely

This post is about the performance Mariana Lafrance did at her vernissage on April 12 for her exhibition entitled To Not Be So Lonely at the Art gallery of Sudbury.

She used the two puppets that she had made earlier from cotton dyed with walnuts.  She set up a checkerboard for them to play with made from charcoal dust and flour and her grandmother's china.

During the performance Mariana manipulated the puppets to play the checker game with a pool cue, each taking turn.  She spoke for them, using a childish aggressive dialog in French and in English.
eg.

'What's your favourite colour?'
"C'est le noir"
'Black, you like black?  That's not a colour"
"Ce n'est pas une couleur?"
'Nope, not a colour.  Me, I like pink.  Purple too. Pink or purple.
Those are my favourite colours."
"Rose et mauve? Ça c'est des couleurs de fille."
"..."
'I can't wait to be a grown-up.'
'When I'm an adult, everyone will be nice to me."

 When kings were made, a cup was placed in a saucer and tea was poured.

"Do you want any sugar"
'Sure, I'll have some sugar'
"We don't have any sugar"

"What do I do with the history that belongs to me and to my family?"  asks the artist.
"Checkers is a war game."

As well as the assemblage left behind from the performance, Mariana's exhibition consists of 3 videos, 3 textile drawings and several photographs.  In every instance there is a duality or a feeling of twinning in the imagery.  Mariana also uses her hands very expressively in all 3 videos, giving them a sensuousness rare in this media.  The exhibition will be on view until May 14 2017.

She explained her ideas about Not Be So Lonely to the gathering who attended and I quote her below:

The intent of this exhibition is not about the loneliness of the individual but more about the process of opening up to people around you, both as a person and as a culture.  In the process of opening up, you find that the others around you are more similar to you than different, and you find that they are quite like yourself, like twins, in a basic and essential way.  You bring "you' to that other person, and that other person brings themselves to you. Once you've done this you start to see humanity as yourself and others,  mixed up and yet essentially the same.      Mariana Lafrance. 

le homecoming

a doe by Jenna Dawn MacLellan

Ned and I attended the opening of Le Homecoming at la galerie Du Nouvel Ontario in Sudbury on March 17.

a fragile deer at the Galerie du Nouvel Ontario in Sudbury - made by jenna dawn maclellan

I was pleased to meet the artist, jenna dawn maclellan.  Although Jenna exhibited and taught a workshop at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery at the very same time as the Mended World exhibit in 2013 we did not meet then.

A mosquito net made with gold thread by Jenna Dawn MacLellan

Jenna also told me that she knew daughter April from when they were both at Concordia University in Montreal.

A protective Mosquito suit made by Jenna Dawn MacLellan for her exhibition Le Homecoming

 Now she teaches art in an Ontario community not far from here.

Wood Pile made from cloth by Jenna Dawn MacLellan

Her show was very loose and playful - and gives permission to those of us who have ideas and just want to make things that we imagine and remember.

fire wood made from cloth printed and sewn by Jenna Dawn MacLellan

"as familiar as they are fantastic"
"being transposed into textile gives an air of storied marvelousness to their otherwise ordinary nature."

The Mosquito suit at Le Homecoming at the GNO in Sudbury Ontario until May 5 2017

"This is how objects found in Northern Otario sheds are transformed into icons of northerness"
(from the GNO's text  - read the full text and see more images here.

also here is a video with the artist

feel better

I made my first bundles after my mother died in 2007.  I was inspired by Magdalena Abakanowicz's burlap and sisal pieces that she made in 1978-80 entitled Embriology.  She made about 800 bundles in a variety of sizes.

I used soft batting at first (see here) and they took me about six months to carefully make. I was teased a bit, (Ned referred to them as hoo-doos), but I was coming to understand that it was the process of making that was helping me to deal with my recent personal trauma.

After them I began to wrap tree branches and clover stalks as a way to connect caring for the environment with a human metaphor of nurturing.

Although the good feelings would come over me as I wrapped the branches, the resulting bundles raised more complicated emotions.  The figures I made looked shrouded, not swaddled.  They looked mummified and sad. (see here if interested)

As an artist who wishes to communicate on an emotional level, this set up a challenge for me.  The bundles on the wall here are white with red thread, but they did not begin like this.  They have been wrapped three times.  They started off in 2011 as happy little things with four coniferous twigs wrapped in colourful cloth.  See here.

Over time, those twigs became bald and I needed to nurture them, and so wrapped them first with thick yarn, and then as you see here, with soft white cloth.

Arranging each of these little bundles in my hands, each one different from the next, gave me the same positive feelings as those first wrapped forms had.

In order to understand this perhaps you need to do it yourself.  The materials are here.  Make a bundle and take it home.

 Try it, you will feel better.

These images from my installation up until April 18 at la galerie du nouvel ontario in Sudbury, Ontario, part of a curated exhibition entitled Pop Folk Textiles  The text is from my little artist-talk at the vernissage.

hillside kind of feeling

It's the last weekend of the Mended World exhibition at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. 

The gallery is two floors.  The photos in this post are of the works installed upstairs.

The stitched journal, "Not To Know, but to Go On" takes up two walls.  It's made by couching fabric to artist canvas with embroidery floss.

The curator selected some of my writing to place here and there on the walls.  

"Consider how it feels to be on a hillside looking out over the horizon.  It is the vastness that takes us into our own inner immensity.  The many small marks within that space (ripples in lakes, wisps of clouds, moving grasses) keep the eye moving and distract us just enough.  It is my hope that you have this hillside kind of feeling when confronted with the work in this exhibition." 

The scale of the work is important,  but so are the small hand made marks.  They are intimate.

My friends climbed the stairs with me up to the second floor.  Then they rested. 

Peace Noel

 

Linda Finn is a remarkable artist, mentor and friend.  Nearly a neighbour, she lives north of highway 17 in Eliot Lake.  Most probably she is not aware of how much it helps me to know that she is also in northern Ontario, working in her studio. I'm sharing just two of the hand made angel cards we have received over the years from Linda because they are life-affirming.
Love and Peace
xxx   

Perivale Gallery

When we first moved to Manitoulin, I took my paintings over to the Perivale Gallery in Spring Bay to see if   Sheila McMullan would show my work.  She and her husband Bob decided to "try" me the following year.

" But that's Ivan Wheale's gallery" I was told by the locals, naming the most well known (non aboriginal) artist on Manitoulin Island. 

Each spring I produced new paintings and after viewing them propped up against the gallery walls, Sheila and I would discuss art over a glass of wine.  Maybe Sheila would have preferred it if had I continued to paint water colours of my children, but my work changed.  I grew just as the kids have.  Matured.

Sheila, I can still feel your encouraging and determined spirit.  Miss you. xxx

Sheila Florence McMullan  1926 - 2012 

My watercolours in this post were painted in the 90's and showed at the Perivale Gallery.

These images are scanned from slides as the originals are in private collections.