Installations
Inner – Outer Labyrinths
This body of work dealt with the notion of the experience of life being like a journey through a labyrinth with the inherent pitfalls and dead ends and final release. It became a powerful symbol for certain polar constricts such as male/female, inner/outer and as in the ancient world, order/chaos and time/space.
Fairytale 2000 Installation – Artropolis 1987
This piece was conceived to be part of the Les Enfants Terrible section of the large group show, Artropolis in Vancouver. I collaborated with a group of my young students to create the Fairytale and all of its components with wall paintings signifying the characters and in sculpture pieces. It was a delightful piece and engaged the viewers to read the tale with a modern new twist.
Pressed Memories
In this body of work Pressed Memories beginning with found wooden ironing boards and transforming them into marking stones, obelisks or altar-like pieces and in a sense a container of the lives lived. This form notes the ritualization of many domestic tasks in women’s everyday existence. The manufacturer of the wooden boards gave them the title The Queen # 1 or The Princess. In these works Pressed Memories, I too, was trying to elevate the mundane to the rarified. Women and imagery link contextually in the work. First, with the object concerned with labor-intensive, repetitive tasks given to women then linked with the Heroic /Goddess imagery that subtly plays with humour and paradox, the roles of women and their great spirit and capacity from the past to present.
Radiant Pressed Memories
The work was originally prompted by a chance discovery of an old wooden ironing board in a home leveled for new development and seemed for me like an Egyptian obelisk – a marking stone of the lives lived there. The thematic concerns for this exhibition were the ritualized view of women’s work – the tedium, the rubbed pressed surfaces, coupled with the power of the feminine as evidenced in the ancient past. And by the personal impact of significant present action of individuals whose lives radiate, making such a difference, just in my orbed lifetime. I collected and was given the ironing board and some were stamped in a modern-day tribal sense – The Queen # 1 with a crown emblem of rich organic colours that led to associations of icons, altarpieces, and the goddess figure imbued in the vessel container. The form of the installation tried to hearken to the House of the Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome with its archways and the placement of the ironing boards where the statuary line the pool filled with radiating Etruscan spiral patterns. The pool border has the names of individuals whose lives radiate outward in the world and the sound component of water and music of John Tavener, and Andreas Vollenweider. There were dance performances in the installation to the Protecting Veil where the dancers signified in movement the thematic elements of the work. Finally, a recent visit to Italy and Paris with the imprint of Masterpieces freshly viewed, coupled with the colour of Tuscany, the frescos, Etruscan and Roman sites inspire the work that was radiantly pressed into my memory.
Sacred Ground, Skin & Bones
Sacred Ground is a space of quiet solitude and mystery where something ” Other” speaks and the inner mind and heart listen. Wisdom and direction are stored in the quiet pool of the soul. The notion of self-realization, awareness, enlightenment, and transformation are integral elements of this body of work. The thematic concern was experiential and as man has often been drawn to Sacred places of transformed energy and the ancients believed in altered physical environments to try and trigger the conscious and unconscious mind to venture into a new experience and way of being. One enters the piece and the walls are covered with large Paleolithic-like drawings and they contain two forms of icons. One is like ancient shards, representing the influence, time, knowledge, and direct immanence from the wisdom of the masters and the other is a coloured window on tablets signifying that wisdom over time has been transformed by the intellect. The viewer traverses the installation with low light and harmonic sound to arrive at the final inner chamber to encounter the sculptured forms that allude to the spiritual masters. The archaeological and anthropological references are inherent in the work and the sense of marking and layering becomes a pure realized statement of existence.
Site/Sight – Posited by Physical Agency
This work in collaboration with artist Brad Chernoff at the Burnaby Art Gallery was looking at ancient sacred sites, temples and the sighting of the Oracle. We were looking at a desert landscape it terms of colour and broad vistas and in my work the notion of swiftly traversing the planet in flight. We created a temple-like structure and painted a floor canvas and the back wall of the gallery to enhance the sense of the earth and horizon as well relating to the site-specific architectural features of the gallery. We hoped the viewer experienced a sense of an elevated perspective on a flight path and sacred landing sites.