Barb Hunt, (l to r) “Lace Dress,” 1995, plasma-cut, cold-rolled steel, “Small Dresses,” 1994, plasma-cut cold-rolled steel, Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank, “Orchid Dress,”1993, plasma-cut cold-rolled steel.

Mention paper dolls to nearly any North American woman and the response is a soft “Oh, I loved my paper dolls.” While huge numbers of little girls spend hours happily re-inventing themselves through playing with their dolls, in later life, the notion of “paper doll” goes sour. Taking her cue from a line in “Tulips,” a poem by Sylvia Plath—“And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow…”—curator and Mount Allison professor Anne Koval assembled a range of contemporary artists’ responses to the cut-out to explore the shadows that paper dolls cast forward into adulthood in her exhibition Paper Doll (September 16 to November 6, 2011, Owens Art Gallery, Sackville, NB).

After discovering that Plath made her own paper dolls and invented scenarios for them, carefully described in her journals, Koval arranged to borrow a collection of them for exhibition from the University of Indiana. The dolls represent attractive women with glamourous, sexy wardrobes with jewel-like colours and details. Made when Plath was 12 or 13, they evoke a magic, miniature, idealized world of childhood play and provide a window into Plath’s sense of imaginative agency before her attacks of depression.

Today, Lynn Yamamoto’s “Silhouettes” (1998- 2011) make visible Plath’s line of poetry through chains of hundreds of uniform, faceless, ephemeral figures cut from translucent white silk tissue paper and peppered with minute holes, burned in with incense sticks. Held out from the wall on steel sewing pins, they capture a passage from childhood magic to later feelings of loss and emptiness.

With more humour, Cindy Sherman’s animated doll (“Doll Clothes,” 1975) updates Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” stepping out of her plastic sleeve in a paper doll book to strike a series of overlapping poses. A pair of human hands interrupts her play at trying on outfits and returns her to her prescribed, slotted space.

In contrast, other exhibiting artists develop more nuanced positions based on the cut-out that re-claim and celebrate feminine identity. Cybèle Young celebrates her pleasure in the cut/fold/play of miniature paper dresses while wryly acknowledging the confining constructedness of post-war North American femininity. In pristine white shadow boxes, she juxtaposes exquisite miniature paper dresses with evocative partners such as jellyfish and scaffolds, all made from fine Japanese paper. One exhibits Young’s delight in the critical potential of her paper doll imagery: curled sheets rise aloft from a tiny curling iron to coalesce into a whirling orange radiance.

Barb Hunt transforms the cut-out doll dress into a symbol of formidable female strength. Subverting both the passive ideal of femininity and the feminist rejection of feminine floral prettiness, Hunt reclaims “paper doll space” with three massive (c. 200 x 100 cm), lacy cut-out dresses executed in plasma-cut, cold-rolled steel (1993-95).

In a further critique of dismissing feminine floral ornament as merely decorative, Jeannie Thib’s wall relief, “Double” (2011), takes its motif from a historic tile pattern found in Barthète, France. Cut from thin plywood, panels composing the repeating pattern are hinged together, so that the relief transforms into a flexible, three-dimensional shape-changer that plays with unexpected shadows on the wall. While eschewing the doll image, “Double” exploits the cut/fold/play procedures of paper dolls to imagine structural flexibility based on decorative beauty.

Anna Torma explores with delight the “back-story” of paper dolls in the most feminine medium of silk embroidery. Transforming embroidery into a drawing practice, she creates a sensuous garden driven by desire. The first large panel of “Vanitas I & II” (2011) overflows with fanciful paper doll-like clothes and posing models. Close inspection reveals small figures in the throes of lust, surrounded by swarms of tiny transforming creatures. The teeming fecundity is countered by the second panel, bearing a nearly life-sized embroidered figure of the flayed man of medical drawings, who re-figures the consequences of time passing that no art can arrest.

With “Revel” (2011), Ed Pien revels in the cut/fold/play of cut-outs in a large, spiral installation of clear mylar suspended from the ceiling, enriched by a projection of itself doubling its shadows on the wall. Viewers follow a path between barely visible mylar walls, populated by mysterious cut-out figures crouching among branches. At the centre of the maze is a random web of mylar line entangled with miniature houses, also cut and folded from clear mylar. Bricks remaining from the gallery’s construction anchor the web to the floor. The entire rear wall of the exhibition space is covered by a haunting video projected through the installation and its shadows. The video shows Pien’s female assistant playfully fastening the little houses in the web. The video of the installation shot through itself caught light refracted through the houses, so that some in the projection shimmer in delicate spectral colours.

It is pure magic and completes an argument made by the exhibition as a whole for the feminine cut/fold/play world of paper dolls and ornament as creative ground for re-thinking relationships among ourselves and with our built and natural environments.

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.”