Bodies of Work

Background (1980s and 1990s):

Swimmers

Swimmers: In Graduate School, I swam laps in the university pool to distance myself physically and mentally from the politics and pressures of academia. This activity generated a series of over-life-size, self-referential paintings of underwater swimmers that continued well beyond my thesis exhibition. Water, for me, provided a viscous mirror that fractured, distorted and reflected form. Submersion was analogous to a dream state. The large scale was determined by my elongated reach with a brush in hand.

My studio during the following decade was located in an inner-city artists’ co-operative. My artwork from that time (1990s) included paintings and drawings in various series such as: The Muses, Glass Cocoon, Articulations (with poet Fred Wah), Heavy Water, Mug Shots, and Vessels.

The Muses

The Muses explored the geometry of the human body clothed in dense chiaroscuro. The body referenced was my own (mirrored) form.

Glass Cocoon

Revolving doors (from a dream/nightmare image) became the subject for the Glass Cocoon series of paintings and monoprints. Their spatial ambiguity and aquatic palette recalled the Swimmers.

Articulations

Then a series of large spontaneous drawings evolved. The addition of text came later. I fed some drawings into a manual typewriter and typed on words i.e. snaking through the guts, or obsessively repeating: mentor/tormentor. Needing more words, I contacted poet Fred Wah, who created, enlarged, and embedded his own text in and around each image. This collaboration, called Articulations, culminated in an exhibition of 48 co-authored drawings plus public performances.

Heavy Water

Heavy Water portrayed the true and tragic story of a woman I came to know while I was visiting Siberia. Lydia’s story touched me deeply.

Mug Shots

Perhaps in reaction to the gravity of Heavy Water, a playful series of Mug Shots, utilizing my extra passport/visa photos, evolved. I simply painted myself into Art History. Elaborately framed, these little freehand portraits continue to amuse me.

The Vessel

The Vessel series explored notions of containment by means of the stenciled contour of an Oriental egg pot. And like the Mug Shots, borrowed liberally from Art History – but often with a shift in focus.

War Brides Series (2001- Ongoing):

Website: www.warbrides.com

When my mother reached the milestone of her 80^th birthday, I felt compelled to paint her portrait. Needing a huge canvas to portray the only parent I knew, I sacrificed a Swimmer painting, but allowed the watery essence to pervade the final image. I chose to portray her at a pivotal point in her life and worked by eye from an old photo that my father (a New Zealand military pilot) kept of his young Canadian bride. Into the periphery of the canvas, I inscribed names of “bride ships” to New Zealand, including my mother’s ship, the Wanganella.

Although the portrait alluded to my mother’s voyage as a war bride, it spoke to me of a deeper journey, her journey through life. Titled One-Way Passage, it became the catalyst for an extensive series that straddles contemporary art practice and women’s history.

One-Way Passage opened floodgates on a tide of women whose lives were parallel; each had married a foreign serviceman during wartime, then travelled far, and gained and lost so much. I came to know hundreds of war brides in Canada and beyond. These surrogate aunties poured out their memories with cups of tea, memories of emigrating alone by ship, of love and loss.

Tear Bottles (2002 – ongoing, mixed media) are tiny glass vials each containing a fragmented portrait suspended in seawater and sealed in beeswax. Dangling by thread or reflected in a cracked mirror, they nestle in a vast 3-D collage.

Shoulder-to-Shoulder (2002 – ongoing) is a collective portrait composed of individual paintings on plywood panels. The rough timbers trap pigment. Early marks can be glimpsed through subsequent layers of paint, not unlike the archeology of memory. Collectively the panels stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a loose zigzag of mutual support.

Leap of Faith (2005, mixed media) parachute, photographic projection and vintage shoes. 

Tug of War (2011) is a large “drawing” made from a single length of steel wire. It is loosely based on a 1946 photograph of 15 young women spontaneously linking arms on the deck of a “bride ship.” Temporarily drawn together by fate, they are in the central phase of a rite of passage.

Why do the lives of these women resonate so deeply with me? Their voyages, physical and emotional, speak to all life-altering passages; they address the profound lack women’s voice is in history, and tell the one story I never heard from my mother’s lips, her story.