Lockdown keeps me from planned work in my Cotton Factory Studio in the summer and fall of 2020, so I take hundreds of pictures of waves on the shore beside my cabin. In Hamilton I paint on small torn up pieces of paper in my living room – exploring an old china coffee set made during WWII in Czechoslovakia. We all have our approaches and methods; this is how I regulate the stress of pandemic lockdown and sweeping global change.
Summer of 2020 I become fascinated by the smash and draw of waves and undertow – the ‘underwaves’ of Georgian Bay.
December 11, 2020. Reclaiming my watercolour technique from 30 years ago is a good way to calm the world. I catch covid-19 ten days after this photo is taken.
On Winter Solstice I catch covid-19. Ten days after my quarantine is over the second wave of infection sends us into Lockdown Two; strict province-wide stay at home orders. I continue with the small pieces, grow ever more fascinated by ellipses, by light on and through porcelain, drawing order within chaos. Research tells me that this is a coffee set, made in Poschetzau Germany at J.S. Maier & Co, during the second world war – but how do they know these dates, when the company was founded in 1890?
kaolin deposits near Poschetzau (now Bosciany, Czech Republic) – white clay used for porcelainJ.S. Maier & Co was founded in the village of Poschetzau by three Jewish families in 1890 – in what was then Austria/Hungary. After the Paris Accords in 1919 it became Germany. After Hitler was gifted Czechoslovakia in 1938, the same village became Czechoslovakian. The shares and factory were then confiscated by the Third Reich, who sent all Jewish workers, managers and owners to work camps.
“In 1938, Otto and Josef Ehrlich and Arthur Maier lost their shares in the company for the German Reich. The company was taken over dr. Hugo Apfelbeck and Dr. Heinrich Langle. After 1945 the factory was nationalized and worked until 1967. In 1958, the company probably was incorporated into the state conglomerate “Karlovarský porcelán.” (see https://www.geni.com/people/Nathan-Ehrlich/6000000041114249153)
My coffee set was made in this factory after 1938 and before 1945, in a time of violent, violent global turbulence and permanent change. I’m humbled by this story. Each piece of the porcelain set that I’m drawing is now humanized – each painted mark made by a steady hand while the world changed and the war raged all around. I find places on some pieces where the hand slipped, where the lines aren’t perfect. Now I’m painting these pieces not just for my own relief of stress, but also for the gilders and workers at J.S. Maier, for the founders and their families who died at the hands of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Beautiful, human imperfections
The torn pieces fit back together like a puzzle into their original places within a 40” x 30” ground painting – the puzzle of us, separate in a changing world while necessary changes arise for acknowledgement. This felt therapeutic, satisfying – a reconstruction after isolation, reconnection after lockdown, even across apparent divides.
Three lockdowns, three waves. From the 2020 water studies
We re-emerge after lockdowns, yes. But we are different from who we were in 2019. We share a new preciousness for life and gentleness. Perhaps, after these months of living with ourselves in the lost-ness of isolation, we are stronger. We feel a new sovereignty in our souls.
The next stage of the Conversation Pieces project is to take the work into actual conversation with gathered people and, with thoughtfulness explore the next layer of the puzzle that is us. In times of great adversity and stress, we make beauty together, we humans.
From the group of five pieces I made during the February Lockdown, from a torn up 30″x40″ ground painting with silver ink on it. These five come alive in the changing light; chaos and order intertwined.
January 2020 marked the beginning of my third year of this self-directed Hamilton Residency. The Pandemic happened in year two, and I found myself working in my apartment, unable to get to my studio. All galleries and performing art spaces had been closed to the public during lockdowns, and so like my music and art pals, I had to learn the business of online gallery presentation and sales.
But I think we can stretch ourselves further. I wanted to make the show an artistic statement of its own – a ‘performed’ exhibition, in response to the covid pandemic and restrictions, in response to the sweep of global change. I’ve had the pieces beautifully framed, and hung a Pop-up Exhibition in the same apartment where they were conceived and made, as well as published in an online gallery.
Now that restrictions are lifting you are invited to come for tea, and have a look at the show. Anyone who can’t come in person can book a personal tour with me by phone between July 26 and August 6, 2021. (links for this will be published on July 26).
We re-emerge after lockdowns, yes. But we are different from who we were in 2019. Shaken. Wiser, perhaps. More thoughtful, more conscious of what is valuable. Humbled maybe, by a new-found, still-fragile love for life and connection, for choice over the way we live our lives.
…Fuelled by these wonders my work in studio has produced inks and fabric dyed with colours from ten different trees, a buffet of interesting resist experiments and paper dyed for book works.
I read stories these days of people who are leaving bad jobs, tired relationships, selling house and/or business and hitting the road in trailers or camper vans: conscious, well-considered decisions to unhook from old programming and step forward into a new sense of freedom. That can mean anything.
Ah the warm golden morning sun, full on my face. This apartment, where I’ve lived and worked through thirty months of this Hamilton Residency experiment has housed me gracefully and generously. There’s enough space here to hang a show of twenty-one smaller pieces and several more larger ones. There are two beautiful trees in the […]
The Artist talk for my Conversation Pieces July 2021 show is all around me in …pieces. A story about my Dad, a memory from the Mary Schneider School of Art at age 13. Some bits about Toxic Ego Art I encountered at York University in the early 80s, and how for a long tragic time […]
I take the world’s floods and fires, the sick ash trees in my beloved forest, the fighting and looting, the art show I’m doing everything I can to launch and support myself with in pandemic times – I take all of this and my fumbling, hot, rash-covered body to the lake, and I weep.
Ah, technology. and humans. On June 18, I wrote a post about the poignancy I felt in releasing this website, which I’ve lived and worked with happily for eleven years. The company I’d hired in early May to build me a new one then erased the post and two others that same day, and uploaded […]