Susan Wood, “Dress No. 1,” 1989, dry pigment, watercolour, pastel, carbon, washi collage on paper 199.4 x 129.5 cm (irregular), Collection of The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery

I was the first visitor to wander into to Earth Skins: Three Decades of Drawing by Susan Wood mid-afternoon on August 23. I am particularly fond of Wood’s ability to capture flux, complexity and beauty with textured, at times messy, (oh the joy of coffee stains and blotting paper — real life! Imagine!) technically brilliant drawings of flowers, insects and dead birds. She layers skin-thin Washi paper, collaging it to a thick watercolour paper base and drawing over it, adding texture and dimension. Her obvious love of the materials she works with and absolute love for the process is simply inspirational.

Wood’s older works are very large: These are the “Devils Purse” and “Dress” series, executed between 1985 and 1990. I had never seen them before and found them very powerful. Over six-feet high, they hang frameless on the walls of the gallery. They are in the space with the viewer, as opposed to separated and protected by a pane of glass and the strange ghostly reflections that obscure the work. One might even venture to say that they are active in a way — one says paper relaxes, that paper breaths. Wood’s desire to have the material unfettered, unrestricted and accessible makes me draw connections to British sculptor Rose Garrard and her sensibility to the elements preventing or insulating the viewer from being touched by art.

Under glass or not, the graphic punch of these series will not be denied. The pieces blow you over as you enter the space. Looking at her renderings of shadows is coming into contact with honed observational and technical skills. There is obvious delight in this creation of depth. In both series Wood uses stand-ins (skate egg sack and a dress) for women’s bodies. The viewer is led to empathize with and relate to these forms from the inside out, bypassing the voyeuristic gaze that objectifies. It is for me a reversal of sorts, a re-empowerment also. Margaret Atwood, in an essay included in Dropped Threads, discusses working from the earth on up in contrast to from theory down, to ensure vitality and potency. This is how I experience Wood’s works — a validation without any confining definition of the corporeal experience of being a woman.

Wood works in charcoal, watercolour, conte and ink. Made of coal, burnt and raw umber, rust and sanguine, her pallette is punctuated periodically in later years with a flash of ochre or vermillion and lends itself well to these explorations of body. I understood each dress drawing as a meditation on one aspect of the bodily experience of being a woman. There is a sense of a procession through stages, cycles and ordeals — each tied into the glorious muck-andguck veins, organs, sex, flesh, sinew and bone, that make our bodies. It takes a certain kind or courage and bravery to embrace all that we are, to be curious about discomfort (about body hair for example) or the edges of pain. I perceive Wood’s art process as grounded in the experiential, sensual feminine, as a combination of intuitive representation and deliberate mirroring of life cycles and processes.

Susan Wood’s work has a quality of practice to it that surpasses the mere definition of the term. Repetition, development and honing of skills, openness to possibilities and adventurous embracing of mistakes are all imbedded in this body of work and skillfully highlighted by Susan Gibson Garvey’s expert eye as a curator, but beyond this one perceives a practicing of discomfort, pain, loss — a dedicated toning of heart muscles that are working toward acknowledging, making sense of and absorbing the nature of our reality. Her most recent work in the exhibition, simply titled “Bouquet,” is truly the culmination of this practice. It is achingly beautiful in its starkness. Each line, each mark conveys such clarity and presence that one simply stands a bit straighter and feels compelled to take a deep breath to take it all in, to feel it all and to be touched by the art.

Sarah Burwash, Still from Finding Way, residency at Wilderness State Park, 2013. Photo: Carson Davis Brown

LIZZY HILL: What moves you to explore our relationship with nature in an age when many people are probably better acquainted with their computer screens?

SARAH BURWASH: I feel like more now then ever we need to become intimate with nature, to care for it, respect it and learn from it. I want to draw attention to out-of-touch relationships with the nature natural world and how that reflects in our emotional lives. For me nature is a very healing and soulful place and I go to it when I need to gain perspective so it is a natural subject matter for me to use, it provides me a huge visual vocabulary to tell my stories.

LH: You created a series of drawings for Visual Arts News while doing an artist residency in Norway. What was that experience like and how did it influence your practice?

SB: I had a great experience in Norway. The residency was set on a remote farm in Suldal, in the southwestern part of Norway. I was provided with a farm house in the hills to live and work in. The farm has no road leading to it and I had to hike up the mountainside to reach it. It was very remote. I could go days without seeing anyone, just the sheep roaming the hills. There was no internet either, life became very simplified—stoking the fire, hiking the hills and making work. I was joined by Brenna Phillips two weeks into the residency which really enriched the experience. My research and source material for the work I created came from the surroundings and my experience exploring the area rather then the internet, which is an easy default for source material. I have Norwegian heritage so I was really thrilled to connect with that.

Photo of Sarah Burwash: Courtesy of the artist

LH: Has making art always been part of your life? 

Yes it has. I grew up with a very creative mom who had me and my brothers making arts and crafts everyday and from a young age I was set on being an artist when I grew up. I grew up in a small town in BC in the mountains and spent a lot of my youth hiking the hills and at our family cabin where I would sketch and draw. I turned our childhood tree fort into a studio when I was a teenager. 

LH: Your book The Far Woods was recently touring across Canada with Conundrum Press and features striking, dreamlike illustrations inspired by Canadian pioneer women and explorers. What is it about this subject matter that caught your attention?

SB: The roots of my interest in this subject matter goes back to when I was a young teenager. I grew up with two brothers, which I feel has impacted my practice a lot and the role models I turn to. At times I felt excluded because I was the girl, and so from young age I fought to be treated equally, to be included, to not let my gender restrict me. For awhile my approach was to be really masculine (I became a huge tomboy) but I realized after a while that that approach wasn’t right way to go about it, and so I turned to books and stories of women who where subversive to be my role models and empower me.

LH: I loved the ink drawing you created for our Spring 2014 issue, “Mother of Life.” Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired this work?

I did a residency in Paonia, Colorado in 2012 and while there ended up attending a Women’s New Moon Group, a monthly gathering of women who made a ritual that celebrates the moon cycles and women and things like this. They had a binder where they collected things related to the Moon Group and in it I found an image titled ‘Goddess of Life’ and it was the source of inspiration for this drawing, I made my own version of it. For me it is about mother nature, creation, cycles.

LH: In your recent residency with the floating group Cabin-Time you had the opportunity to get lost in Wilderness State Park and as a result created your body of work, Finding Way. What’s your own relationship with nature like? How did you feel once you were lost?

SB: Wilderness State Park offered the opportunity to explore the beyond and to get lost in that exploration. Getting lost is more than a physical circumstance, it is a state of mind, a gateway to discovery. I set out daily in different directions, East, South, West and North, meditating on mantras to invoke the different directional signs and elements, and lost myself in subtle nuances of the natural world with a compass to guide me home. I feel really comfortable in nature, I grew up immersed in it—it’s maybe where I feel most comfortable and most myself and I really love to explore nature independently. I also like to test my navigational skills and resourcefulness in the woods and to challenge myself to trust myself, my knowledge and my instincts. It was when I became lost that I knew I had arrived.

LH: What’s next on the horizon for you? Any exciting new projects or ideas you’d like to let us in on?

I am currently doing a thematic residency at the Banff Centre called “Winterjourney.” I have a solo show at UAS Gallery in Calgary this spring and am exhibiting with AKA artist-run centre in Saskatoon through their billboard project. I will be doing a residency at Point Pleasant Park in the Gatekeepers Lodge this spring and a residency at Struts Gallery this summer.

Artist Annie Macmillan takes the public swimming at Halifax’s “Little Lakes” during her Fieldwork residency. Photo: Katie McKay

This summer as part of the Fieldwork residency project—a series of residencies in the HRM this summer for artists who “employ research methodologies and fieldwork practices generally associated with the natural and social sciences”—artist Annie Macmillan is seeking out every lake in the Halifax Regional Municipality with the name “Little Lake” and swimming its perimeter. Her plan is to turn those maps into drawings that tell the story of each swim. In this interview for Visual Arts News, Veronica Simmonds catches up with her to talk about her underwater adventures, her artistic process and her exploration of a city’s edges.

Join Macmillan as she leads her next public swim, Wednesday August 7.

Photos by Katie McKay
Podcast Music:

Apparat- Sayulita
Air- Alone in Kyoto
Yann Tiersen – Till the End

Foster, Chris. 1977 GMC. Various materials. 2012. Courtesy of the artist

Halifax-based artist Chris Foster’s Frontiers in Real Estate explores contradictory themes of civilization—its fear stories, misguided good intentions and self-indulgent sincerities. Foster’s dark humour is never moral, at least not overtly. Composed of serigraphs, collage and small sculpture, his work considers the history of consumption, both visual and commercial, with a tongue-in-cheek objectivity. “I’m interested in engaging a broad audience, despite their politics,” explains Foster during our phone conversation. “My work is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At first it is very accessible, but underneath it is very critical of culture. People don’t like to be jabbed in the eyes right away; everything needs to be veiled.”

Three works begin the series of serigraphs, depicting communities of wooden structures. There are no figures, and therefore the emphasis is on the buildings and their allusion to human resourcefulness. Can Do (2011) is reminiscent of the illustrations of the sites of early European explorers, such as Samuel de Champlain’s Habitation at Port Royal (1604). In Stay Free (2011), a vehicle is dismantled and incorporated into the construction. A black flag flies; the place has no allegiances. In Abandon Ship (2012), Foster has depicted a Noah’s ark-type structure surrounded by burnt forest, flying an upside-down Canadian flag. Later serigraphs include Com Tower (2012), Com Tower #2 (2012) and Com Tower #3 (2012), in which communication towers have been transformed into high rise wooden houses. These are hermit dwellings with a million dollar view.

A second body of work is composed of small models of wooden homes built on the backs of motor vehicles, with names like 1977 GMC ‘Wrecker’; 1977 Chevy Van; 2 n’1 JEEP CJ-7; and Suzuki ST30 ‘Post Car.’ Foster was inspired by the 1979 publication Rolling Homes, which surveys mobile homes converted from pickup trucks, school buses and big rigs. These individually crafted houses on wheels combined the spirit of the old-timey covered wagon and the mobility of contemporary motor vehicles, forming an original artistic and cultural movement based in a do-it-yourself tradition that continues today.

History is punctuated with waves of escapism, particularly in response to major socio-economic shifts. The Industrial Revolution brought mass tourism, as the newly formed middle class left the city for excursions in the countryside. Modern mobile culture came to fore with the Great Depression, and continues to be a preferred method of escape for various subcultures. It seems to reappear with every generation, arriving in response to the horrors of war, of mass crass commercialism and fears about pollution. Now, when the decline of the Western empire seems really quite tangible, it only makes sense that some should wish to pick up and drop out. Foster agrees, with a caveat: “There’s something about e time that we’re living in, with its economic pressures, that makes escape seem really romantic.” The idea of retreating into the natural world is seductive for Canadians still, “despite the fact that we’re poisoning nature and have an increasingly abstract notion of nature. It’s all rooted in fantasy.”

The third series features black and white collages, cut from the pages of a publication by Foster titled New Civilizations. Using a mixture of photos taken largely from National Geographic magazines, Foster combines old and new imagery to create improbable landscapes. Ancient civilizations and modern towers are unabashedly paired, as are piles of tires and decaying towers. One image shows a cathedral mostly buried in the sea, as two amused but relaxed individuals stand on the beach to admire it. Kate Walchuk aptly describes the tone of this series in her intro for New Civilizations: “Relics from these dead civilizations are contemplated with mere sentimentality; they function as kitsch destinations for world travelers and history buffs.

Each collage only becomes strange after a good hard look; it is often difficult to see evidence of scissors. But the cutting and pasting is there and speaks to Foster’s honesty of process and material. The decision could also be considered a nod to 19th century composite tourist imagery, prevalent in Europe and North America— photographers and postcard producers, confined by available technology, would often cut and paste objects into scenes. Their emphasis was not on being factual, but to formulate an arguably “true” representation of a visitor’s experience. Foster’s collages have the same intentions; verity is not important here, but rather the slow shock of juxtaposition that we encounter when viewing the image, and with that, a message that rings true.

Much like the tourist imagery to which he alludes, Foster has made his work readily available for purchase by the public, and has constructed each piece so that it can be efficiently transported home. “Maybe if this was a different time, I’d be working in large sculpture or paintings, but living and working as an artist in Canada is not viable in that way. Paper-based work and small sculpture are part of a creative process that I can ship. It can seek out audiences in different places.” The exhibition will continue to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and Dawson City, Yukon. It will develop and change for each venue.

As dystopic as Foster’s message may be, it comes with a wink. His “frontier” is a concept, a psychological state of change and possibility. For him, it is in small gestures of rebellion that change can be effected.

My expectations of Yellowstone had been too high. I’d conceived of the natural world as something distinct and separate from the human world—a faulty division at best. As environmentalist Bill McKibben famously states, we are living “at the end of nature.” Human activity has permeated the natural world to such a degree that our idealistic notions of where nature ends and we begin no longer hold water. “An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant,” explains McKibben. “The idea in this case is ‘nature,’ the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died.”

In this issue of Visual Arts News, a handful of artists explore the creation and collapse of boundaries between human-made and natural worlds. Emerging photographer Declan O’Dowd explores the barriers that humans erect between themselves and the wild. O’Dowd’s photographs of Lunenburg County portray curiously decorated fenced-in gardens, designed to keep local deer from devouring produce. Only as Visual Arts News writer Veronica Simmonds learns, local residents often feel penned-in themselves by these constructions of their own design. Halifax-based artist Chris Foster explores our escapist tendencies in his recent travelling exhibition Frontiers in Real Estate. Foster often depicts the mobile home, those traveling temperature-controlled habitats that we rely on when we wish to experience nature, without actually being in it. Ironically, both artists depict humans caught up in almost futile struggles to keep nature at bay, while the actions of our species have already penetrated each and every layer of the globe.

Writer Paul Wapner succinctly characterizes the fusion of the natural and artificial human-made worlds in his book Living Through The End of Nature. “Humans, animals, plants, and machines are now morphing into each other … ” he writes. With irrevocable advances in fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and pharmacology, “we are not so much circumscribing nature as splicing ourselves into its very processes …” The human tendency to insert ourselves into the processes of the natural world has long been a source of cultural unease—Mary Shelley issued a grisly warning to the scientific community when she penned Frankenstein, the science fiction novel about the crazed scientist Dr. Frankenstein who created a living creature, known simply as “the monster,” out of composite parts. “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” writes Shelley in her diary while on a summer tour of Europe in 1816. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life … Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.”

We often feel a similar sense of unease—the sense that some spiritual boundary has been crossed—when faced with imagery in which the hidden secrets of the body are exposed, dissected and “unnaturally” rearranged. The materials and processes involved in the creation of American artist Pat Hickman’s work, can induce an initial response of repulsion. Hickman’s work, recently on view as part of Dalhousie Art Gallery’s exhibition A Very Long Engagement, breathes new light into once living organic materials, mainly the intestinal lining of hogs. The work literally turns the natural world inside out, forcing viewers to consider the fact that the systems and processes governing their own bodies will one day too collapse. And it is at this moment of realization that the line between ‘us’ and ‘nature’ evaporates, as our tendency to label nature as ‘other’ is prompted largely by a secret desire to outsmart death, a mad denial of our own mortality. But as a second glance at Hickman’s work—delicate and meticulous arrangements of inert matter into hauntingly beautiful wall-hangings and sculptures—its those “monsters” we create when we wish to hold on just a little longer that lend our lives at the threshold of nature and artifice their colour.