By Jericho Knopp
Danielle Hogan’s book Light and Material: Weaving and the Work of Nel Oudemans begins with a quick primer on weaving technique and terminology. The short description demystifies the craft and allows the reader to better understand the true creative genius in the work of the book’s subject: Nel Oudemans. Light and Material is a biography of the acclaimed New Brunswick weaver, but more than that, the book tells the story of weaving in the province: a tale of resilience, persistence, and mastery that mirrors Oudemans’s own.
Oudemans was born in the Netherlands in 1918 and trained in tapestry weaving and embroidery in Sweden and Norway. After putting her weaving career on hold due to the Nazi occupation of her homeland, she and her husband, Jack, moved to Fredericton, where they had accepted a contract to work at a plant nursery.
Once in New Brunswick, Oudemans worked at the nursery, raised a family, and restarted her weaving career, connecting with the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. It didn’t take long before she’d become indispensable to the craft community in the province. The technical mastery of her weaving combined with her steadfast work ethic and boundless creativity combined to form an artistic practice that brought Oudemans great acclaim over her decades of work and a lasting legacy in the form of the Nel Oudemans Award, established by the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation in 2002 after she died.
In fact, receiving that award is what first prompted Hogan to learn more about Oudemans and her work. In 2003, while in Victoria working on her MFA, Hogan received the second Nel Oudemans Award.
“Because I had gone to NBCCD, I knew who Nel was. I did not take weaving at the college, but she was such a presence. She had a very big personality. So I knew of her. I never met her,” she says. “I made a point of learning a little more about her when I was honoured with the [award].”
Fast-forward a decade and a half, and Hogan was fresh out of school yet again and ready for another project. She’d just completed her PhD in interdisciplinary studies from UNB, and her dissertation focused on how the art world systematically undervalues textiles as art because the primary creators, historically, have been women.
Germaine Pataki-Thériault, Managing Director of Gallery 78 in Fredericton, knew of Hogan’s dissertation and connected her with Oudemans’s long-time neighbour, acclaimed writer Nancy Bauer, who had been working with Nel’s husband, Jack, to get a book written about his wife and her work.
“It was impossible to not get excited about writing this book about Nel, because [Jack] was so excited about her and what she had done and contributed,” says Hogan. “I was really inspired by his passion for getting Nel’s story out.”
Armed with access to Jack’s incredible wealth of stories and his passion for his wife’s work, Hogan got to work in bits and pieces, fitting the research and writing of the book into her already full life wherever she could. She knew she didn’t want to write a straight biography but rather to contextualize Oudemans’s story in the cultural place and time in which it occurred. She explores the deep history of New Brunswick’s textile industry, from the first cotton mill in the province, built in Geary in the early 1850s, and the founding of Loomcrofters handweaving studio by Pat Jenkins in the 1940s up to the talented weavers and fibre artists making their mark on the province today.
The result is Light and Material, a beautiful book in both the visuals and the language. Oudemans’s work is the focus of the images, but the scope of the text is immense and sometimes overwhelming, the subject shifting abruptly in an attempt to cover a vast array of subject matter within its 145 pages. It’s easy to get lost in the endless number of people and dates that are chronicled in the book.
But that might be by design—making sure the story was as full and accurate as possible was incredibly important to Hogan. As our interview comes to a close, I ask Hogan if there’s anything else she’d like to add that I didn’t ask about. She uses the opportunity to emphasize the heaviness of the burden when writing about history.
“I think the weight is worth bearing, because I think it’s so important that we learn about the people who’ve walked these places ahead of us and all the successes and the challenges and the failures that they faced,” she says. “It’s such a huge responsibility that I didn’t understand until I really wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted and tried to get it ‘right.’”
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