Feminine Writing: The House With the Golden Windows

the house with the golden windows

 

In 1993 I made a paper and canvas piece entitled The House With the Golden Windows.  It was inspired by a childhood memory from when our family drove home from Fort Frances.  My mother would half turn her head from the front seat and point at the small farm houses set back from the road, their windows glinting from the late afternoon sun. “Look at the golden windows” she said.

Last week I found an envelope of black and white photos of the house. I'd like to talk about them in today's blog post.   

Helene Cixous

This art piece is an example of Feminine Writing, described by the important French philosopher / intellectual / writer, Helene Cixous. (born 1937)   She said: 

The feminine writer, like a mother, looks with a look that recognizes, studies, respects, doesn’t take, doesn’t claw, but attentively, with gentle relentlessness, contemplates and caresses, bathes, and makes the other shine.  She brings back to light the life that has been buried.  She signs its name.  

I believe that this sewn house is feminine writing because it shines a light on the domestic day to day.  It makes that daily life shine while using feminine techniques and materials.  

For one year, I took a photo every day from within the house I lived in with my family in Kenora, Ontario.  Every day I chose an interesting or beautiful sight from one of the windows, and then snapped it with my film camera.  Although the east side of the house did not have many windows I did take a few from the window over the kitchen sink that looked directly at where the neighbour kept his garbage cans.  

However, my favourite view was of the back yard.  It could be seen from the many north windows and most of the 365 photos are from the north side of the house.  

the north wall interior

I was a mother artist when I made this piece.  You can see the children's sandbox from the north facing windows.  The house was finished in time to exhibit it in the Lakehead University degree show in the spring of 1993.  We moved to Manitoulin that same year.    

this detail of the north window shows the maple tree and the neighbour's fence

I didn’t realize that was to be our last year in the house when I began taking those photos. 

the house with the golden windows, 1993

The house is an installation.  I wanted to make a piece of art that would require my viewer to move around it in order to understand it.  I wanted that same viewer to enter into the house and feel some kind of emotion.  I wanted my viewer to experience my work with the body.

Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton, (born 1956), was working with the idea of the body as a way of knowing during that time.  There was an article about her installations in an early 90's  Fiber Art magazine when I was just coming up with the idea to make this house.  Although I wasn't yet familiar with Helene Cixous, I knew about Ann Hamilton.    

When we experience something with the senses (smell, touch, hearing, sight)  and also with movement, we become open.  We receive and resonate.  We experience a poetic recognition.   

Louise Bourgeois

Another artist that has influenced me when I was making the House with the Golden Windows is Louise Bourgeois. (1911 - 2010)   Her art helped her deal with her emotions.  She needed to make art. 

She also expected her viewer to have an emotional response to her work.  She famously said, "If you are not touched by my work, then I have failed."  

Femme Maison  1946
 by Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois was 35 years old and was raising three boys when she made this piece.  She believed that the domestic world of a mother artist was worth making art about.    

“Art is not about art. Art is about life, and that sums it up."  she said. 

But what emotion do you think Louise Bourgeois is communicating with her image of a woman squeezed into a building?  She made other Femme Maison pieces. See here. 

This house is about domesticity, yet it is not a domestic object.

This piece was made for an art gallery.  The reason that I don't have good photos of it is that it needs an art gallery kind of space to install it in.  

I believe that quilts are art.  I have always believed that.  By making an installation like this, obviously for exhibition, I help others to realize that sewing and patchwork are valid techniques for art making.  

I turned 40 in 1991, and was just beginning to take ownership of the idea that I could be an artist and a mother at the same time.  I leaned into art as a kind of salvation.  I didn’t keep my art passion a secret from the family, but I also didn’t talk about it.  I did it.  I also did my best to be a good mother.  I don't know how I did it now that I look back.  People ask.

I do know that my art was and is a place for me to be truly me.    

The House With the Golden Windows

It has been a long time since I have written about this piece.

When I made it, we were living in Kenora, a middle sized town in North Western Ontario, two hours drive from Winnipeg, six hours from Thunder Bay. 

I was 40 years old and had four children ages 4 – 13 years.  My husband had just left Kenora for a new job on Manitoulin Island, and the children and I would soon follow him there.  It was the final year of my fine art degree from Lakehead University and I made this piece for my degree exhibition.  One of my advisors was Mark Nisenholt, who I will always remember as the one who loaned me his copy of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  I have my own copy of that book now, and re-read it regularly. 

Sewing and quilting were not looked on with favour by the university, but for some reason, that did not deter me.  Rather, I was stubborn about it and built this house with thread.  I poured attention and time into it.  Ned was gone and I needed to finish the drywall and painting that had been left undone in our home so that we could sell it.  I sewed the magazine papers to the canvas in the middle of the night while the children slept. 

That was the year that I shared a studio with Barbara Sprague, an artist who was in the same stage of her fine art degree with Lakehead.  The studio was important to me.  I needed to pin the papers up on a wall and step back from them to look, I needed to be able to leave them in piles, untouched.  I left home for the studio as soon as my four year old stepped on the bus for junior kindergarten in the mornings, and was home again before she was dropped off around 11:30 am. 

 (This isn’t really an artist statement; it’s more of a memoir.  )

The way that windows are able to look like gold at a certain slant of light was the impetus for this installation.  When I was a child, we lived in the country, and I remember being in the back seat of the car driving home and my mother telling me to look at the golden windows of the houses that we passed.  And I did.  I looked at them.  They had a magical quality.

So magical, that when I was a mother of four and had a house of my own I remembered that idea of looking at domesticity from the outside.  Of imagining what it might be like.  What it could be like.  That is what the outside walls of this piece are about; the dreams and hopes a young woman has for her home and family.  So many of those dreams are fed to us by our society’s consumerism and by the fairy tales we are brought up with, but some of them come true. 

It’s very complex.  I built the walls of my house from small squares of paper carefully cut from glossy magazines that promise a beautiful life.

trunk show #5: the house with the golden windows

The House with the Golden Windows, East Wall. (about 5 feet wide )

This post is a continuation of that trunk show series I started last fall, just after speaking to the Pomegranate Guild in Toronto. Putting it up on my blog gives me a reason to photograph older pieces in digital format. It's been slow going.

When I spoke in Toronto, I just took the East and West walls of my HOUSE but there are four walls altogether, each with an inner and an outer side. North and West are click-able. The outside of the house is made from women's decorating magazine papers. I suppose they represent our some day dream house. There is a certain time of day when the sun’s reflection makes windows go golden and magical. machine stitched with miles of thread, the outer wall was then distressed in the dryer. House with the Golden Windows, East Wall from the inside.

The inside windows were my view from the windows of our home in Kenora. I took one photo a day for one year from whichever window seemed best on that day. There weren't many photos from the East facing windows, as our view was blocked by the large house next door. It was just lucky that the neighbours chose that year to replace their major appliances, and leave their old ones by the back door for months.

I made this cloth and paper house for my BFA graduate exhibition from Lakehead University in 1993. It was then shown four more times over the next few years. The House with the Golden Windows, 1993, machine stitched paper and photos, dyed canvas, hand embroidery, shown as installed in A Space Gallery in Toronto in 1994

pause

art exists in consciousness not in materials

artifacts

rolled up? the east and west walls from the house with the golden windows.
on the wall? vintage wool blanket, cut and re-stitched by many hands "Perhaps the process itself is the art. What is then created is just the artifact." Mary Babcock

the house with the golden windows: north wall

the outside, 1993, 5 feet x 5 feet x 1/2 inch the phases of the moon, hand stitch glossy magazine papers collected, sorted, machine stitched Reverse side. The inside of the north wall film photographs taken through the north windows of our house in Kenora, North Western Ontario. nearly twenty years ago I took one photo a day for one year (1990) from one of the windows of our house. When I documented our life in this way, I had no idea that we would soon be moving south, to Manitoulin Island.

down to earth

Quilts are down to earth. They are manifestations of a simpler time. The hands on effort required to make them is one of the things that makes them strong and true.

Solar discs

Although the primary function of embroidery seems to be decorative, it is rooted in belief and superstition. Embroidery is closer to tattooing than to weaving or knitting.

The House with the Golden Windows

This is my graduation piece from Lakehead University. It’'s called The House with the Golden Windows . Each wall is made from found papers stitched in a grid to artist's canvas. The idealized images are from glossy home and garden magazines. I use the house shape often as a symbol of protection and privacy.

I am posting these images because Ann Clarke, one of my thesis advisors, visited us here on Manitoulin for an over night stop yesterday on her way west from Kingston to Thunder Bay. She teaches painting and drawing at Lakehead but is now on a sabbatical year. Ann showed me photos of her visit to Berlin.