Carl Stewart, “Halifax diptych (Green Street),” 2010. Found fabric, jade, beads. Photo: Lawrence Cook

For many Haligonians living in a city full of students and other transient young people at a time of widespread bedbug fear, the sight of used mattresses may arouse disgust or serve as a reminder it’s end-of-the-school-year time again. For Carl Stewart, each mattress isn’t merely bedding, but a source of fabrics, often strange and wonderful. The Ottawa textile artist’s work has frequently focused on queer identity, but in his Halifax show at Eyelevel Gallery of two-dimensional wall hangings and quilts made from fabrics salvaged off curbside mattresses, fragments (May 13-June 16, 2011), he looks at what happens to the bedding we sleep on after we discard it.

Born in PEI, Stewart started his post secondary studies at the University of Prince Edward Island before falling in with the weaving department at Charlottetown’s Holland College School of Visual Arts. After taking a tour, Stewart immediately picked up an application and dropped out of university. “Best decision I ever made,” Stewart says. He had never done “anything like” weaving prior to starting the program. The program largely focused on what Stewart calls “production weaving,” which was targeted at the tourism industry and involved making place mats and tablecloths. Stewart quickly found himself focused on “art weaving,” working on figurative pieces with male nudes.

Moving to Ottawa after college, he continued weaving and exhibiting his work. In the late 1990s, he began combing the internet for images of gay porn, creating “erotic tapestries” and large-scale work that could rival the Bayeux Tapestry — Stewart’s 1996 work, called “Nice Shoes, Faggot,” was an 80-foot tapestry with video made “in reaction to and in commemoration of” a young waiter at Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier, who a group of teenagers chased, robbed and beat in the park behind the hotel, as he left work to walk to his home in Hull.

The mattress series took root in 1996, as Stewart noticed the discarded mattresses and box springs lining the streets on his walk to work. As a textile artist—a broke one, with little money for materials—he was struck by the variety in coverings on the mattresses.

“I was really surprised by how beautiful some of the fabrics were, these satins and brocades and really wacky prints,” he says. He started clipping small swatches that eventually became larger until “I was literally skinning whole mattresses.”

He first presented the work in 1998, when he was still stitching together small bits of mattress. Stewart’s pieces have grown since then — the bulk of the work in the eyelevel show is 18”x18” fabric samples, decorated with rhinestones, beads, embroidering and paint. Other pieces are more collage like quilts of mattress swatches.

For his Halifax show, Stewart traveled to the city months before the exhibition to collect mattress samples and used fabrics from both Halifax and Ottawa in the show. He did the same for a 2005 Toronto show and also clipped labels from mattresses on a London visit. “I see this as this sort of unwitting collaboration between the people in Ottawa and the people in Halifax, where the fabrics come together,” he says.

Stewart chooses mattresses “for their patterns, for their stains, sometimes for where they are.” He’s interested in the stories behind fabrics from certain places, often comparing those from rooming houses with those from affluent neighbourhoods.

“We have this whole idea of what is clean and what’s not,” he says. He notices patterns within the mattress styles, different eras, the abundance of low-end mattress designs and the variations on the term “chiro” in mattress brand names. In one of his favourites, a bright pink pattern, a couple in eighteenth century attire court in a garden and a rhinestone-eyed owl watches over them. “It’s this total eighteenth-century toile, but it’s on a mattress that was made in the ’60s. I just find it really kooky.” Others have garish vinyl-coated 1960s flower patterns, rocket ships and old-fashioned illustration recalling nineteenth century catalogues.

Asked about connections between the series and his other work, Stewart says the cue is in the show’s title, fragments—the bits and pieces that create a narrative. “It’s increasingly a common thread in all my work,” he says. “All we know is the address (and the objects)—we don’t know anything about the people.” Or, as he puts it more succinctly, “Who else but a fag is gonna sew on stinky old mattress fabric?”

Stewart doesn’t clean his fabric samples and sometimes picks pieces especially for the stains, but he started putting samples in the freezer in the past few years out of concern over bedbugs, and he tries to be vigilant about what he picks up. Though he began the project for the fabric, Stewart reads deeper into the themes the mattresses bring up.

“There’s all kinds of things that come into play. There’s class, there’s the socioeconomic thing … there’s the relationship to the body,” he says. “You see something lying there, and if you see someone taking it away, I think a lot of people get this weird little shiver down their spines, like, ugh, I could never sleep on that … I think that people have a really visceral reaction to the work sometimes.”

KAYLEE MADDISON: What does the “house” personally mean to you?

PAM HALL: I use the word “house” as both noun and verb—as a noun, it signifies a specific place, location, site for home, for work, for play and from which to be in community. Most simply, it is a building to live in and at its most complex, it is something that must be built together with others, and that holds the history of all who have inhabited it. As a verb, to house means to give shelter to, to accommodate, to hold or contain its inhabitants, their memories, actions and histories.  The works in this show are in conversation with all of those meanings.

KM: All of the works being displayed have never been shown in St. John’s, Newfoundland, your home, before. What does it mean to you to bring these works home?

PH: It is profoundly meaningful to bring this work home, to share with others in the place I have been living and working for 40 years. When one works “away” as much as I do, unfolding stories and conversations in other communities across Canada or the U.S., many people at home have no idea about the work one is doing—the questions one is following. It matters deeply to me to open these conversations here—to step back into conversation with my own geographic community and those within it who have helped me make it home.

KM: Many pieces in the exhibit are created through collaborations with the public. Is there anything in particular that has surprised you about how people contribute and interact with your ideas?

PH: I have been working with others as collaborators and participants for many years, so am no longer surprised by the generosity, engagement and willingness of others inside and outside the art community to lean in to some of these projects as my partners. I am continually sustained by their contributions and am always reminded that there are many, many ideas that cannot be realized alone.  I am not surprised by the amazing contributions of others in these community-engaged projects, but am always profoundly grateful for their engagement and support. One of my favourite elements in HouseWork(s) is the names of contributors and collaborators listed on the walls throughout the gallery. They are all there in the space with me.

KM: You’ve noted before that the collaborative types of pieces you create are often an example of an artist having to let go from controlling the work. What do you find most difficult or challenging about not knowing what’s going to happen to your initial idea?

PM: Letting go of control is something most artists learn from working with unruly materials or in sites and locations where wind, water or weather are part of the environment. As someone who has worked outdoors on site for many years, I had been dancing with elements I could not “control” for a long time, so moving towards working with other people seemed like a natural evolution. The challenges of working with others, where your own decisions are not the only ones at play, keep me nimble, humble and responsive. It reminds me that I am not imposing my will on the universe, but rather am dancing with and within it. No matter how my initial idea evolves or transforms, I am always learning how to realize it as aesthetically, as effectively and as evocatively as I can.

KM: What do you most enjoy about collaborating with the public and those outside of the art community?

PH: The learning, the dialogue and the participation in conversations larger than those within the art world, these are what I most value in collaborative work with artists and non-artists. I adore people who know “stuff”—whether they are scientists or fishers, doctors or dancers, bakers, knitters, boat-builders, mapmakers or cooks. It is privilege and pleasure to work with other knowledge-holders. I also am deeply moved when total strangers in diverse “publics,” step into participation in a project where it is clear that I could not make the same work alone. It is a great gift as well as a significant responsibility to make visible and acknowledge the labour of others in the artmaking process.

KM: The exhibit includes works from the past 10 years. Over those years how has social media changed the way you engage with communities?

PH: There are three projects in HouseWork(s) that were enabled by social media and electronic communication and thus the internet has extended dramatically both my “communities” of conversation and also the locations in which I might put my work into encounter with others.  Over the last decade, social media in particular, has also enabled me to be in dialogue personally and professionally with a much larger and more diverse “village.” It allows me to live on an island in a very specific cluster of communities and to avoid feeling isolated, disconnected or out-of-touch. For someone like me, who is essentially a hermit—social media invites me into good company and reminds me I am living in a world bigger than my house and garden, my neighbourhood, my province, my nation or even my species.

KM: How do you believe the combination of creating both solitary and collaborative works has helped you grow as an artist?

PH: To quote two memory cloths from Marginalia (my four-year long collaboration with Margaret Dragu, represented in the show by The History House): “Solitude keeps her sane” and “Relation keeps her civil.” 

My solitary practice feeds me, keeps me fuelled.  It is the place I do my research, keep my material and conceptual investigations strong and nimble, and figure out how I want to materialize my meaning and where I want to set-it-to-work in the world. My community-engaged collaborations or social projects are where I try to open dialogues and step into conversations with a larger world than my own creative expression—where I try to make the meaning matter, or set it to work. Sustaining both types of practice has helped me grow immensely, not just as an artist but as a person who believes deeply in the work that art might do in a world that needs many voices engaged in building sustainable and inclusive futures for more than just some of the inhabitants of the planet that houses us all.

Both kinds of practice then, invite me to learn and listen deeply, to be in conversations across difference and discipline, and to remember that—whether in a single community or the larger world—we do not build the house alone.