Articulation's Current Exhibition Connected Heritage, Gimli, Manitoba

The exhibition is on all summer at the New Icelandic Heritage Museum in Gimli Manitoba.

 Research for this body of work began with a study session covering Winnipeg, Gimli and the Inter-Lake area of Lake Winnipeg. I posted earlier about the trip here and here. When we Articulation members were back in our respective studios, we got to work sifting through all our research materials narrowing down a mass of images, stories and information to a focus which caught our imaginations enough to want to go deeper while being guided by the "Connected Heritage" concept the group had settled on.

While out and about exploring I was enamored with the boats and the unique way of fishing. The Icelandic people had brought with them their way of fishing and learned from the First Nations people how to adapt from the sea to an inland lake. Other settlers such as the Ukrainians and Scots also contributed their knowledge to make InterLake fishing the unique industry it became.

And I loved everything about the Icelandic horses. I watched all of the movies I could find where they starred and I found several documentaries on them.

But as is usual for me after an Articulation Study Session, once I got home and into my studio, my interest was piqued by a different subject. Part of my ongoing research involved reading about the history of the Icelandic people and I focused on their unique DNA heritage that has been studied in great detail. A long isolated human population with written records going back centuries can tell geneticists a lot. This knowledge can be applied to the benefit of other populations, for example, understanding the origins of genetic diseases enables diagnostics tests and drugs to be developed.

I became intrigued with the way a group carries its genetic identity with them no matter where they settle and their cultural identity is carried in their material possessions.

Recent genetic research has confirmed what the sagas have been saying for generations. Genetic research has come up with the statistics. Seventy-five percent of the males in the founding population was Scandinavian, mainly Norsemen. Fifty percent of the founding females were Celtic from the western coastal areas of the UK. It seems the bachelor Norsemen picked up Celtic wives before heading across the sea to settle in Iceland.

The Icelanders brought this genetic heritage with them when they settled in the Canadian Inter-Lake area. They also brought their cultural identity embedded in the few possessions they brought with them.

I decided to work with well-worn woolen blankets, essential items they may have brought with them. I projected an image of an old woodblock print onto the blanket then cut the image away suggesting how their cultural identity is embedded in their material culture.

Stitching the design

Cutting out the design to show the backing blanket

Blanket stitching around the design lines

Genetic research has noted people of Icelandic descent are very likely to have blue or rarer green eyes: 89% of males and 87% of females, with green eyes being more common in the women.

 

 I illustrated this genetic trait by colouring the male's eye blue and the female's green. This genetic trait is still very evident in the current population.

Each Articulation member explored a different aspect of the Interlake population. Visit Articulation's Blog here to see what others have worked on.

If you find yourself in Manitoba this summer, I do hope you can take a trip out to Gimli to see this very interesting exhibition and to take in the sights in this unique town.

WAR: A Personal Response, Body of Work, 'Home Comfort'

Home Comfort

Wool, cotton, plastic; hand knitting.

Chrome Island as seen from Blue Shift's deck

2 years ago my husband and I took a month to sail around Vancouver Island. I took a knitting project to work on every day. I wanted to feel what it was like for the ones who stayed at home to be encouraged, implored and urged to use every spare moment to knit garments for those fighting overseas.

In preparation for the voyage, I went through my stash gathering up all yarns in 'serviceable' colours resolved to use only what I had to follow the wartime mantra of 'making do.'

Provisioning and refueling stop.

During WWII, the Royal Airforce put out a call out for more scarves for plane crews. Planes were getting larger, flying higher and for longer creating long periods of bitterly cold conditions for crew members in cramped, noisy quarters. My grandmother Florence must have been pleased to be able to make something to help her 3 boys in the airforce, something to help keep them warm and comforted knowing someone at home was thinking of them.

Another provisioning stop is a chance to lay out and see what I have knit so far.

I had in mind to make one long, long scarf to suggest the idea of 'mindless knitting.' When both hands are engaged in an activity the mind is free to wander, to get into the zone where there is a comforting flow back and forward between both sides of the brain. In this state, the emotions are calmed and one loses the ability to keep track of time. Knitting becomes a soothing, timeless activity.

Florence would have found great comfort in getting lost in such a revery where she could process her trauma, calm her grief-weary mind and take comfort in caring for her boys while publically appearing to support the war effort.

Knitting is one of the few activities that can be picked up and worked on when it is smooth sailing and can also be thrown down without harm when there is a crisis to manage. 

I can knit when it is cold and sunny though every so often I need to hold a hot cup of tea to warm my hands.

I can knit when it is hot and sunny. 

The wool doesn't mind getting wet with rain or salt water.

The colours I work with have several layers of meaning. During WWI and WWII each military force had its own distinctive colours: airforce blue, navy blue which is almost a black, and army khaki yellow. In European cultures, black is the colour of death, grief, and mourning and blue is associated with depression. The personal levels of meaning are black for Florence's grief in losing her husband, eldest son and a brother-in-law to war, airforce blue as a reminder of her 3 sons risking their lives in the airforce, Khaki yellow of infantry man's uniform is a reminder of her fiance away fighting.

Installation

I had in mind this endless knitting would unroll throughout the room I created. But no matter how I placed the knitting it didn't work. It didn't create the mindless knitting revery feeling. I ended up stacking up folds of knitting on the ground in front of the chair. It gets the idea across but I must admit it does not have the impact I thought it would. I thought this work would be the strongest one out of the 10 items in the room. As it turns out, and to my surprise, other works have a stronger impact which I will talk about in later posts.

Here is the 'Home Comfort' story from the booklet produced for this exhibition.

The WWII War Office's request for knitted garments known a 'home comforts' provide Florence with the opportunity to publically appear to be supporting the war effort. Privately, knitting gave her time to grieve over her family's decimation - the death's of her husband and eldest son; the absence of two sons away at war. Florence worked in a conflicted state to rationalise and emotionally resolve the duality of supporting the war effort while sacrificing her sons. She had to come to terms with enabling her children to put their lives at risk while battling the strength of the mother-child bond. Florence took to knitting to physically keep her sons warm, emotionally connect with them, do her patriotic duty and provide a means of processing the traumas of war. Endless knitting became a repeated prayer, a meditative chant of 'knit one purl one,' a mantra to calm a battle-weary mind - a home comfort. 

Greece in Winter - 2016 Family Holiday

We looked up

We looked down

We climbed

We looked up

We looked down

We climbed

We walked and walked

And once some of us ran - on the first Olympic track, ever

We fact checked

And every evening we warmed up, sampled unique Greek drinks and talked about what we had seen that day.

We roamed Athens for a few days then drove around the Peloponnese Peninsula for 10 days.

Greece is having a quieter than normal winter with colder than normal weather so we often had the famous sites and the hotels to ourselves.

It was a wonderful family time in a unique part of the world.

National Museum of Women in the Arts - No Man's Land

Magdalena Abakanowicz, '4 Seated Figures,' 2002. Burlap, resin and iron rods.

'No Man's Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection' (here for the online exhibition.) was recently shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.

'4 Seated Figures' may have been inspired by Magdalena's memory of witnessing her mother being shot in the hands as soldiers stormed their home in Poland during WWII. What she says about these genderless, race-neutral figures is 'they are naked, exposed, and vulnerable, just as we all are.'

Faith Ringgold, 'Jo Baker's Bananas,' 1997

One of Faith's story quilts commentating on racism and discrimination.

In Faith's signature technique of acrylic painted canvas with a pieced fabric border.

Outside the museum, a sign warned there were nuts in the building. I thought it strange and only on seeing this box of walnuts realised the sign was an allergy alert.

Jennifer Rubell 'Lysa III' 2014

Jennifer was inspired by finding a Hilary Clinton nutcracker for sale online.

She worked with the concept of harnessing female power making, as she says, 'a scary act of female power.' 

Museum visitors were encouraged, with supervision, to operate the nutcracker. The artist cleverly invites the viewer to contemplate female power in a playful way.

The Hilary Clinton nutcrackers were on sale in the museum shop at the same time Hilary was campaigning to become a president.

Visiting Washington DC Museums - Textile Museum, Renwick, National Museum of Women in the Arts

After attending the Textile Society of America Symposium in Savannah Ingrid and I flew up to Washington DC with the intention of checking out the newly relocated Textile Museum now on the George Washington University campus. Unfortunately, our timing was not great. We could only enjoy the shop because the gallery was closed while a new exhibition was being installed.

We visited the Renwick Gallery. I didn't take my camera because I wanted to focus on looking at the work and thinking about it. Sometimes while I am taking pictures/photographs I feel as though I am missing out on the full experience. 

We also visited the outstanding National Museum of Women in the Arts and spent many hours working our way up through the floors of the gleaming marble building.

On the top gallery floor, we thoroughly enjoyed the current contemporary exhibition "No Man's Land - Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection" where the work was often provocative, cheeky and humorous, as its title suggests.

I particularly enjoyed artists whose use of particular materials was intriguingly icky and so full humour.

Karin Upson's 'Kiss 8' is part of her " The Larry Project." There is bit of a weird story about Larry which led her to paint a portrait of Larry and at the same time a self-portrait. While both portraits were still wet she pressed the 2 together creating 'a pair of unsettling hybrid faces.'

The paint was so thick and textured one had to step back quite a distance before the faces emerged.

Analia Saban's 'Acrylic in Canvas' was so tongue-in-cheek. The paint wasn't on the canvas as is 'normal' with fine art, instead, she filled a canvas bag with paint so it was in the canvas. It was kind of icky while at the same time humourous.

Solange Pessoa's 'Hammock' looked from the entrance to the room like the suspended intestines of a huge beast. But it was not what it seemed. On closer inspection, the materials were familiar: fabric earth and sponges. Up close the mass and scale were somehow comforting which was a huge shift my first impression.

Dianna Molzan's 'Untiled' is work toying with the definition of fine art as paint on a stretched canvas mounted to look as though it is floating against a wall. Dianne took each of those elements and played with them. She removed the vertical threads from the canvas while leaving the horizontal threads mounted conventionally to the stretcher bars. Then she applied paint to the remaining draped threads. I enjoyed the way she had cleverly brought together the fine art expectations with the materiality of craft and women's detailed repetitious work.

Rosemarie Trockel's 'Colony' is another play on the definition of what is fine art. From a distance, her work looks to be worked in the Colour Field style where large blocks of flat colour cover the stretched canvas.

Closer inspection reveals it is not what it seems and so questions the definition of fine art.

Rosemarie is quoted as saying, "I tried to take wool, which was viewed as a woman's material, out of that context and to rework it in a neutral process of production."

Lots of food for thought.

Articulation's 2016 Study Session in Gimli

First stop out of Winnipeg on the way to Gimli was at Arnason's Icelandic Horse Farm.

One of the few places in the world outside Iceland where these distinctive horses can be found.

For more about these unique horses visit Articulation's blog here

Rock Art - Boat - Gimli

The reason why Articulation went to Gimli was to study Icelandic culture.

Gimli (New Iceland) is the largest Icelandic settlement outside Iceland. Back in 1875 and 1876 more than 1,000 Icelandic immigrants settled on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg on land the Canadian government gave them to govern independently. 

We found Icelandic textiles old (as above in the Gimli museum) and new in the local shops.

A Whitefish boat up on the hard. 

Evidence of the early dependence on fishing in Lake Winnipeg was found in many places up and down the western shore.

Hecla historic home

The Icelandic immigrants brought with them their architecture and woodworking skills.

Pickeral and wild rice

We sampled Canadian/Icelandic food whenever we came across it.

For more about Articulation's time in and around Gimli, check their  blog  here.