The exhibition human/nature presents work
by four Canadian artists. Lyndal Osborne, Laura Vickerson,
Amy Leowan and Liz Ingram, to the Chinese cities of Shanghai
and Hong Kong. As I write this, I can not help but wonder
what expectations a Chinese audience has for works from Canada,
a land so far away, so foreign, yet, historically, so linked
with China for several centuries. As I write this, I am aware
that my words will be translated into Chinese, that you might
be reading this in Chinese. I woinder which aspects of the
artworks translate across language and culture and which get"lost
in translation". Of these artists, one was born in Hong
Kong, one in Australia and one spent her youth in India. The
fourth was born in Canada. yet she has exhibited her work
around the world. if there is a subtext to this show, it is
that we no longer know for certain what is familiar, what
is foreign.All four of these artists communicate on personal
and spiritual levels about the nature of the self, the nature
of nature and the importance of integrating the human and
natural worlds. What motivates and inspires them as
human beings is experienced universally across the planet,
as concerns of others become theirs as well. Everyday, as
communication systems expand, our world grows smaller. Technology
transforms experience for us all, yet it threatens to reduce
distance and difference to electrons flickering across a computer
screen. Against this danger of dematerialization, these artists
make work that is profoundly engaged with the “stuff”
of material and natural worlds.
Lyndal Osborne gathers natural materials from agricultural
fields surrounding her house and from beaches to which she
travels. She sorts and stores her collections of pods, stalks,
grasses, stones and nests with obsessive care. Her installations
often include lists of materials, which read like wild poetry:
“cattail, cloves, Chinese chestnuts, corals, Canada
thistle galls, crab apples, chilies. . . .” She fashions
these materials into sculptures, twisting, weaving or manipulating
the dried materials into evocative, metaphorical shapes that
suggest timelessness, regeneration or mnemonic devices that
recall her youth in Australia. As she writes in an artist
statement (1998), “This way of working acts as a bridge
between the memory of my native Australia and present-day
collaborations with the flatlands of Alberta.” Many
of her works are hardly distinguishable as works, as her interventions
are so subtle and respectful of Nature’s processes and
seemingly endless variation. For example, Ball (1996-1999)
consists of birch twigs fitted together much as a bird might
shape a nest, and birds’ nests themselves form the major
component to Point of Departure (1996-1999). In this work,
some 250 nests crowd together like a sea of grass on a steel
table. Each is fitted with a tiny black liner, an addition
that is at once comical and abject, in that it underscores
the absence of the nest’s original owner. This economy
of intervention can be observed in the works on view here,
Cultivated Objects and Accretion Tables, both from 2003. In
these, taxonomy and display comprise the major strategies,
as both consist of grids of nine boxes filled with natural
and industrial materials set on tables. Cultivated Objects
simulates a shoreline in which various patterns are created
by detritus marking the outer edge of the water’s reach.
The abundant materials are arranged somewhat casually, evoking
an expressive painting. Fresh grass fills the centre, the
sharp green contrasting with the more subtle hues of stones,
pods, natural and man-made debris. The material in Accretion
Tables is arranged more methodically as specimens from an
obscure museum. These boxes are divided into smaller compartments,
each filled with a sorting of shells, twigs, seed pods, fungi,
stones, feathers and other materials. The natural world here
is converted into a tableau, its insouciant chaos disciplined
and tallied, yet, unlike a scientific presentation, this arrangement
evokes marvel. It engages us sensually through the imagination
rather than through neutral objectivity. Osborne selects materials
specifically for their appeal to the senses of touch and smell
as well as sight. By incorporating materials as they approach
their final state of decay, she integrates the twin processes
of life and death into her art. We ponder the rationale for
particular objects being brought together, yet we respond
intuitively to the multi-sensory stimulation.
Laura Vickerson similarly works with plant materials, although
she prefers the velvety petals of domestic roses to the wild
botanicals that so attracts Osborne. For Vickerson, roses
connote universal associations: love, death, blood, flesh,
passion and memory. Like Osborne, Vickerson gathers, sorts
and preserves her resources, interrupting their natural cycle
of decay through a form of resurrection. She re-hydrates the
petals prior to pinning them onto lengths of filmy organza.
In this way, she covers meters and meters of fabric with neat
rows of identical petals, creating elegant drapery-like fabrics.
Her site-specific installations have been shown in such different
venues as an abandoned textile mill in northern Britain and
a Byzantine church in Istanbul. Her method of working recalls
embroidery and other forms of women’s work directed
towards domestic consumption and beautification. It celebrates
the sociability and creativity of women’s communities
while simultaneously creating contemporary installations of
great ambition, integrity and drama. The intensive labour
required to produce these sumptuous works recuperates and
pays homage to the beauty created by generations of women,
as it acknowledges the emotional constraint imposed on those
denied more public forms of expression. Rose Red Curtain (1999),
the work that will be shown in Shanghai and Hong Kong, was
originally created for a bay window in an historic estate
home in Ontario. Here, it mediated between a luxurious interior
and a rose garden situated beyond the wall. Spiraling tendrils,
roots or veins tattoo the upper portion of the organza substrate.
The translucency of the fabric admits sunlight, simultaneously
embracing the emotional life of the inhabitants within and
the teeming life of the garden outside. The lower portion
of the curtain flares out across the floor, resting heavily
like the dense velvet curtains that once decorated the room.
A second work--to be shown in Canada--William’s Carnations
(2001), similarly assumes the form of a curtain, yet this
one is patterned with two shades of red petals: maroon and
ruby. The pattern derives from a William Morris design, cleverly
doubling the floral pattern with flower petals. Morris was
renowned for endorsing motifs based in nature and traditional
craft as safeguards against the soul-destroying uniformity
of industrial production. In this way, the metaphor comes
full circle: Vickerson’s petal works explore our deep
emotional attachment to nature as manifested in our attempts
to design and master it. We seek solace in art forms based
in nature, which we have so often displaced or destroyed.
Ultimately, we must come to realize we, like roses, are manifestations
of the natural world.
Concern for harmony with nature as well as with our fellow
human beings motivates the woven rice paper tapestries of
Amy Loewan. Loewan was born in Hong Kong at the end of the
Second World War. She was given the Chinese name, Wai-Ping.
Wai, meaning “gift,” and Ping, from the Chinese
character for “peace,” was an appropriate name
for a child born just as peace was finally declared. She came
to North America at the age of 19 to pursue a degree in occupational
therapy. She returned briefly to Hong Kong and later moved
to Canada, where she has lived for the past 20 years. Active
promotion of peace lay behind the creation of Mandala 2 (1998),
which was awarded first prize in a national competition commemorating
the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. This recognition was very important to her as an artist,
as it encouraged her to continue the innovative rice paper
weaving she initiated with this work. The work installed here,
A Peace Project, furthers Loewan’s integration of ethics,
compassion, healing and respect for human dignity, all values
she brought to her new work as an artist from her health care
career. This large-scale work consists of eight floor-to-ceiling
panels. Computer-generated texts from over 30 world languages
were printed and then pasted onto folded strips of rice paper.
The artist wove the strips brocade-style to reveal and conceal
words within an intricate surface pattern. Each word refers
to qualities she considers essential to fostering peace and
human dignity in the world: compassion, kindness, respect,
understanding, patience, tolerance, gentleness and forgiveness.
The materials and technique reflect Loewan’s Chinese
heritage of calligraphy and woven containers, but the multiple
languages reflect Canada’s essential multiculturalism.
The words flow from top to bottom, from left to right and
right to left according to the rules of the individual language
to produce a polyphonic murmuring of voices. From countless
small gestures and limited means, Loewan has created something
universal that addresses world concerns. As Joanne Marion,
Curator of the Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery has written:
"Weaving is an almost universal method of binding, of
creating something larger from smaller components, of bringing
resilience and strength to impermanent materials. Something
woven can easily travel, can be nomadic, transported, folded,
rolled. It . . . speaks of ingenuity, of something from nothing,
of the modest made to serve."
In addition to the printed words, Loewan has drawn on the
surface with charcoal and marked some with large circles or
mandalas, ancient symbols of eastern wisdom. Together, the
large hangings create an internal architecture or oasis of
quiet and reflection. Like Vickerson, Loewan invests significant
labour into her work. Labour transformed through a sort of
meditative attentiveness brings discipline and order to the
chaos of random voices and language. Loewan uses unassuming,
ephemeral materials and techniques associated with domesticity
and women’s work to create effective and lasting monuments
to peace.
If the work of the first three artists can be characterized
as additive, comprising the manipulating, pinning or weaving
together of multiple components, Liz Ingram’s work appears,
by contrast, hermetic, technological and self-contained. She
presents back-lit photo-based transparencies, which draw subversively
on advertising to address the most natural and immediate of
subjects: water, “like you’ve never seen before.”
Water serves as a perfect vehicle for representing her many
concerns. In its physical structure, it shifts between solid,
liquid and gaseous states; as a symbol, it hearkens back to
ancient Greece as one of the four fundamental elements, and,
as a biological resource, it is essential to life. Her curved
light boxes derive from a single series, Sacred Stream (I-V)
(2001). She brings years of experience as a printmaker to
bear on her manipulation of the photographic images, which
she produced using her own body, a bathtub, an open shutter
and a flashing light. Multiple exposures and aleatory effects
of light create tableaux of great intricacy and movement.
The decision to layer and back-light these images arose from
her practice of viewing transparencies against a light table
while designing multiple-plate prints. The lighting relates
them to the computer screen, yet these images are produced
almost in mute protest against the depersonalizing cultural
effect of ubiquitous, computer-generated advertising. Ingram
spent much of her youth in India, where extremes of poverty
contrasted with heightened sensuality, spiritual wealth and
respect for natural resources. She credits this experience
for developing her interest in “bodily intelligence,”
transitional states, environmental resources and intimacy.
In these images, female hands connote the body of the maker;
they embrace and caress the shimmering water with unbridled
sensuality. As the water pulses, silver bubbles blur the boundary
of limb and liquid, creating a liminal space of fusion. Ingram
brings together two themes that have obsessed her as an artist--the
body and water--to create a poetic metaphor for transience,
vulnerability and preciousness. It is her on-going concern
for the balance between the human and natural world, the embodied
self and spirit that links this work to others in the exhibition.
These four artists can be said to typify Canadian art in that
they all make work that is confident, personal, rich in concept
and highly skilled in execution. Clearly, their work is not
uniform in its visual appearance, nor does it ascribe to any
particular style or mode of expression. What makes their work
representative of this region is the artists’ commitment
to values of human dignity, respect for the environment, visual
economy and a willingness to engage viewers in a shared experience.
Each artist brings her own experience of self and world to
create works expressive of her understanding of what it means
to be human and her responsibility as an artist to nature.
