SALVAGE: remnants of hope and despair

SALVAGE: remnants of hope and despair
ARTIST STATEMENT

When I literally salvaged parts of my large Sanctuary installations from the 1980s, I later repurposed them for new artworks, linking them with my social activism related mainly to women’s reproductive rights, violence against women and climate change.  However, the first Sanctuary installation featured in my MFA graduating exhibition in 1983 was in part, a response to being sexually harassed by an art instructor during my studies at the University of Calgary.  Built in a modular fashion to accommodate a growing mass of new elements, Sanctuary toured in various forms across Canada from 1983-86.

In 1991, I used some of these salvaged elements to build Lest We Forget: a memorial to missing and murdered Canadian women, a public sculpture installed in 1994 in The Law School at the University of Calgary.  In 1992, I again resuscitated parts for a 30-foot relief installation, Abyss, an expression of the challenges of motherhood, both personally and globally. In 2014, the cast handmade paper columns, newly coated with lace-like fabric resembling plankton forms appeared in Water, an environmentally-themed group show at Banff’s Whyte Museum.

The act of wrapping Salvage’s vertical elements resonates with early childhood memories of making “dolls” by enfolding my mother’s discarded cutlery with her sewing remnants.  Over the past 12 years, I’ve slowly transformed these pieces by layering them with handmade felt and paper, lace and doilies, coating them with hot wax and painting them with oil and cold wax.  It feels as if I’m preserving the detritus of life—limbs (human, animal and tree), their exposed and concealed wounds, fascia, corals and plankton.