BOTANICAL ART Dye Plants and Design Emerald Ash

Decorative Arts in Canada | Les arts décoratifs au Canada
SPRING | SUMMER 2014
$10.00
BOTANICAL ART Dye Plants and Design
Emerald Ash Borer | Flowering Passion | Diaphanous Folds
A Victorian Brooch Deconstructed
Ornamentum Spring | Summer 2014
Volume 31 Number 1-2
ornamentum Decorative Arts in Canada /
Les arts décoratifs au Canada
Contents
© copyright, the contributors
Cover image: watercolour of cyclamen,
by Jean Johnson. See page 6.
Ornamentum defines decorative arts as creative
work, frequently of a practical or useful nature,
produced by an artist, craftsperson, or amateur,
which has intrinsic aesthetic and/or historical value.
These arts include interior design, furniture and
furnishings, ceramics, glass, metalwork, graphics,
textiles, theatre arts, aspects of architecture,
industrial and landscape design.
Financial support for Ornamentum has been
provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, which
last year invested $20.1 million in writing and
publishing throughout Canada; the Ontario Arts
Council; the Macdonald Stewart Foundation.
Cette publication a été réalisée grâce à l’appui
du Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi 20,1
millions de dollars l’an dernier dans les lettres et
l’édition à travers le Canada; Le Conseil des arts de
l’Ontario; la Fondation Macdonald Stewart.
14
28
Subscription information
Email [email protected], see
www.ornamentum.ca or write to Box 235,
Station Q, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4T 2M1.
Annual subscription $20.00 (2 issues).
6
Publisher Harriet Bunting-Weld
Editor John Fleming
Managing and Associate Editor Lorraine Johnson
Editorial Assistant Lindsay Rose-McLean
Circulation Martha Wilder
5Editorial Botanical Art John Fleming
6The Diaphanous Folds of Botanical Art: The Work of Jean Johnson
John Fleming
Art direction and design Adams + Associates
Design Consultants Inc.
Pre-press and printing
The Lowe-Martin Group
10The Colours of Nature: Dye Plants and Design
EDITORIAL ENQUIRY & ADVERTISING
CORRESPONDENCE
14Mining Material: The Emerald Ash Borer Noa Bronstein
Please send advertising inquiries to
[email protected].
18The Crying of Lot 222: A Victorian Brooch Deconstructed
Unsolicited manuscripts will be considered for
publication. We publish in French and English.
Articles accepted will be published in the language
in which they are written. For submission guidelines
please contact Lorraine Johnson (416) 536-2325 or
download them from www.ornamentum.ca.
Please send manuscripts, discs, photos and other
editorial and advertising matter to: Ornamentum,
Box 235, Station Q, Toronto, Ontario M4T 2M1.
Deadline for next issue: 31 July 2014
Printed in Canada ISSN 1718-5211
Thea Haines and Rachel MacHenry
Donna Bilak
22
Linking Human to Nature and Hand to Machine:
Marian Bantjes’s Designs
26
Brian Donnelly
SPOTLIGHT ON THE COLLECTION: A Flowering Passion for Porcelain:
George and Helen Gardiner
Rachel Gotlieb
28Eye, Mind, and Hand in Evolution
34
Sam Carter
WHAT TO SEE Decorative Arts Exhibitions across Canada
Editorial
Botanical Art
John Fleming
ALTHOUGH THE DECORATIVE IMPULSE in its earliest historic
manifestations may be ascribed to human understanding of natural
forms and forces as signs with mythic, religious, and spiritual meanings—
sun discs, phases of the moon, wave-like repetitions, and the like—
it seems generally accepted that the origins of botanical illustration arose
as a technique of discovery and classification in the search for plants
and flowers with medicinal properties. This practice of discovery and
application through visual representations of the material world
conveyed both a functional scientific content and a system of aesthetic
markers necessary to the identification of that meaning: thus colours
to attract certain insects, whether bees to pollinate flowers or other
species to feed the insectivorous pitcher-plant. So too can images of
a botanical nature be found in a multiplicity of other material productions, in Aboriginal uses of plant materials for dyes, on pottery and
ceramics that match contents with container, in still-life paintings
and floral watercolours, on sculpted furniture, jewellery, graphics,
and in language, as a complex lexicon of floral imagery constructed
to express human emotions and rituals, traditionally described as
“the language of flowers.”
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THE
DIAPHANOUS
FOLDS
of
BOTANICAL
ART
The Work
of Jean Johnson
John Fleming
BOTANICAL ART HAS BEEN a life-long presence in Jean Johnson’s imagination. She recalls
from early days recurring walks through fields and woods with her father, an avid gardener and
amateur naturalist, who named as they went, in the well-established binomial system of Linnaeus,
wildflowers, plants, and shrubs in both common and scientific terms. Thus the bloodroot plant
(Sanguinaria canadensis), described in Champlain’s Voyages et Explorations (1604) and also in
Elizabeth Simcoe’s Diary (1792), took root in, and still frames, her botanical vision, through images
that now express in her drawings and watercolours the diaphanous effects of the medium: “In the
afternoon we entered a lake (Lac des Chênes) five leagues long and two wide, where there are
very beautiful islands filled with vines, walnuts and other fine trees...The soil is sandy, and a root
is found there which makes a crimson dye, with which the savages paint their faces... ; “…the leaf
springs singly from a thick juicy fibrous root, which, on being broken, emits a quantity of liquor
from its pores of a bright orange colour: this juice is used by the Indians as a dye, and also in
the cure of rheumatic and cutaneous complaints.”1
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Left
Watercolour of orchid,
by Jean Johnson
Above
Watercolour of bloodroot,
by Jean Johnson
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It was at Northern Secondary School that the
instinct and directions of a professional career
as a visual artist began to take shape during the
four-year program in commercial art offered by
the school. The Group of Seven was in the air,
and Canadian landscapes were on the walls of
many Canadian homes. In tune with the times,
market conditions, and personal inclination,
Jean’s first chance of a job after graduation
presented itself as a choice between dull
commercialism and working for Art and Design
Studios, a company producing Captain Marvel
comics, owing to an embargo related to paper
shortages on U.S. comics entering Canada.
Drawing skills were the basic ingredient for this
newcomer to the art scene, attaching character
heads provided by the company to bodies and
action backgrounds to be created and called
to life by the talismanic “Shazam!”
From these heroic beginnings in the age
of action comics, now revisited in our own
electronic times in movies and computer
games, through many stages in the business
and cultural worlds over the years, Jean
Johnson’s enthusiasm for watercolours
persists. I asked her “why watercolours?” rather
than any of the other materials and techniques
that had formed her background at Northern
Secondary in fonts, illustration, life drawing,
painting, sculpture, etc. The answer was
immediate and direct: watercolour supplies
lightness and delicacy of touch; it is luminous
and colourful in effect; its innate fragility and
apparent transience convey the essence of an
object such as botanicals; and it leaves an
impression with the viewer altogether more
life-like and truthful than an image in oils.
And, of course, there are the “lines,” that is,
the basic component of drawing—outlines,
parts, profiles, composition, structure. Jean
also spoke about “contact drawing,” a technique
sometimes used to discover an aptitude for
drawing in a beginner, or by professionals, to
create a more spontaneous image by using a
Iris watercolour,
by Jean Johnson
Orchid watercolour,
by Jean Johnson
single visual look to take in the object and then
allowing this first perception to develop freely
through unmediated imaginative impulses.
These are the thoughts of an artist whose
understanding of the medium is deeply felt and
practised in a spirit of collaboration with paper,
pen or brush, and pigments.
In addition to her activity as a watercolourist,
Jean Johnson is a lecturer and amateur
historian of botanical art in its scientific
beginnings, its medical, topographical, and
aesthetic uses, and a proponent of the many
ways in which watercolour representations of
the natural world have left a compelling visual
and encyclopaedic representation of early travel
and contemporaneous scientific discoveries.
Of particular interest to her in recent years are
native plants, bulbs and perennials, inspired by
those childhood memories of botanizing with
her father, and discovery of the many texts of
early explorers and colonists who have left a
record in words and often images, of local flora
from the 17th century on. As a member of the
Botanical Artists of Canada, Jean continues
to practise and promote the unique qualities
of watercolour as a kind of antidote to the
shrinking presence and fewer contacts we may
have with flowers and plants in a postmodern
age of electronic distractions.
John Fleming is Editor of Ornamentum.
Notes
1 Mary Alice Downey and Mary Hamilton, ‘and some
brought flowers’ Plants in a New World (Toronto Buffalo
London: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 20.
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The COLOURS
of NATURE
Dye Plants and Design
Thea Haines and Rachel MacHenry
Photographs by
Thea Haines
Left
Naturally dyed yarns
Above left
Onion skins
Above right
Chamomile,
Chelsea Physic Garden
APPLYING DECORATIVE COLOUR
obtained from natural sources—plants,
insects and minerals—is an ancient practice,
with evidence of natural colourants being
found in textile fragments from as early as
2500 BC. The practice of dyeing and mordanting
cloth was recorded by Pliny and Herodotus.
Textile trade was vital to Europe’s economy
during the Renaissance and Enlightenment
periods, and the cultivation, processing and
manufacturing of fibres and dyestuffs played
a crucial role. Exploration and colonization led
to new sources of colour with the discovery of
exotic products such as cochineal, indigo and
logwood. Natural dyes were hot commodities,
some so prized that they were more expensive
than gold. There was heavy trade in printed
textiles from India, where skilled dyeing and
printing techniques produced colourful cloth
that was sophisticated and complex, far beyond
anything produced in Europe’s printworks.
European reconnaissance into Indian textile
dyeing and printing techniques amounted to
industrial espionage; scouts were sent to India
to research techniques that could be replicated
by European print houses.
In Europe during the mid-18th to mid-19th
centuries, intense scientific and empirical
research into the complex chemical and
physical properties of natural colour was
undertaken by colourists in these print houses,
which resulted in natural dyes being used on
an industrial scale. Dye-house colourists were
highly valued and respected scientists, and their
research can be linked to much of the understanding we have of colour theory today.
Scientific advancements that facilitated the
large-scale use of natural dyes made way for the
development of synthesized colour and had a
broad impact on the textile industry in the form
of mechanization and innovations in chemistry
and pharmacy.
Interest in natural dyes and dyeing is
currently undergoing a global revival. Fuelling
this resurgence is a growing awareness of the
potential for harm from by-products of the
industrial dye process and greater understanding of the environmental issues related to
textile production.
Interest in local colour is evident in the
spread of community-based dye gardens that
seek to provide accessible natural dye information, such as the Textile Arts Center’s Sewing
Seeds garden project in New York City. In this
garden, dye plants are raised in an abandoned
city lot, creating a community green space and
providing dye material for project participants.
As well, free workshops and tours offer local
residents the opportunity to learn about plants,
harvesting and extraction processes, and dye
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THE PROCESS OF NATURAL DYEING
begins with mordanting, which facilitates
the chemical bond of dye to cloth,
increases colour permanency and
enhances or alters the resulting hue.
Alum, or potassium aluminum sulfate,
a naturally occurring mineral salt,
is the most commonly used mordant.
It brightens plant dyes on all fibres and
has been used in dye houses for millennia.
Tannins, especially useful as a mordant
for plant fibres, are found in many nutbearing trees; those derived from the bark,
acorns and galls of oaks have long been
used in the tanning of leather. Oak-gall
tannin combines especially well with iron
to create more somber tones. Once fabric
is mordanted, dyes can be applied either
by direct applications such as handpainting, stenciling or printing, or
through immersion methods.
The richness of tone and harmonious
colour palette produced by natural
dyes can be credited to their molecular
structure. Typically, synthetic dyes consist
of a single colouring molecule, whereas
most natural dyes contain several different
colours belonging to different chemical
groups. Madder contains as many as 18
chemically different pigments, and can
produce a vast range of shades, ranging
from pinks to corals, oranges, reds,
purples, violets, browns and blacks,
depending on processing conditions.
Other dyes are highly sensitive to changes
in pH; cochineal can produce as many as
60 different shades of red with differing pH
levels. Natural dyes are not limited to use
on textiles, but may be applied to any
natural substance—leather, fur, bone,
grasses and any protein or cellulose fibre.
Diverse materials can be dyed together
in one dyebath, resulting in an array
of shades, as each fibre accepts the
colour differently.
Left
Osage orange dye swatches
Top left
Goldenrod, Horniman Museum
Dye Garden
Top right
Golden marguerite–dyer’s
chamomile, Chelsea Physic
Garden
techniques. The educational mandate of such
projects focuses on teaching the next generation
about the many uses of plants not only as
sources of food, but as sources of medicine,
fibre and colour. At Sasha Duerr’s Edible
Schoolyard in California, schoolchildren learn
about raising fibre and dye plants; Duerr
outlines a process she calls “garden to garment”
to help children connect the plants they see
growing with the clothing they are wearing.
A number of art and design institutions
have recently established dye gardens, including the London College of Fashion in the UK
and Sheridan College’s Craft and Design
program in Oakville, Ontario, where a garden is
currently under development. Campus gardens
allow the entire process of growing, harvesting,
processing and dyeing to be integrated into
the curriculum, and give students maximum
access to design and research opportunities.
Classical dye plant names evoke the global
history of textiles: woad, madder, lady’s
bedstraw and dyer’s broom. Unassuming
common plants from our region yield surprising colour. Roadside goldenrod gives a range
of greens and golds; black walnut hulls,
considered so troublesome to the urban
gardener, give rich deep browns, while sumac
berries and oak galls both provide tannins
used in the mordant process. The richness of
this global plant record can be traced through
a number of historical gardens, such as the
wonderful Chelsea Physic Garden in London,
UK (established in 1673), where dye plants
from around the world are grown, or the
recreated dyer’s garden at Black Creek Pioneer
Village in Toronto, Ontario, which preserves
the plants used by early European settlers
to dye their home-grown clothing.
A number of North American designers
and artists are becoming known for their
use of natural colorants. Canadian Jolanta
Prochnowski’s simple clothing collections for
women are based on muted and sophisticated
naturally dyed surface treatments, while
Homefrocks, a New Mexico-based label,
offers richly coloured garments with historic
references. Mackenzie Frere, based in Alberta,
focuses his art practice on a refined use of
natural dyes in his hand-woven installation
pieces while Brian Vu of Toronto creates
interiors collections by over-dyeing military
surplus with natural indigo.
The distinct qualities of natural dyes are
part of their appeal. The associated historical
narrative, the connection to raw materials, the
capricious nature of each colour, and even the
elaborate process of working them, all lend to
the cachet and appeal of natural dyes.
Thea Haines is a natural dye researcher and teaches
textile design at Sheridan College in Oakville.
Rachel MacHenry is a textile designer whose work
focuses on sustainable artisan production.
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Mining
MATERIAL
The Emerald Ash Borer
Noa Bronstein
IN RECENT YEARS, concepts of greening, repurposing and using salvaged
materials have not only guided the design of spaces and objects, but have
entered the public vernacular in unprecedented ways. Our collective interest
in responsible methods of production, fabrication and distribution has led
to greater focus on the relationship between consumers, makers and
socio-environmental accountability.
One recent example of new challenges sparking new solutions can
be found in the work of several designers who have created functional
pieces using wood from trees destroyed by the emerald ash borer. Since
this non-native, invasive pest was discovered in Detroit in 2002, it has been
attacking and killing ash trees in Ontario and parts of the United States.
It is estimated that the cost of removing and disposing of dead ash trees
will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. In an effort to promote
the productive use of this wood, IIDEX Canada partnered with Ideacious.
com to develop IIDEX Woodshop, an exhibition of prototypes and marketready projects by 15 Toronto-based makers. According to Jeremy
Vandermeij, Director of Marketing and Sponsorship at IIDEX Canada,
the project was launched in September 2013 as a way to increase awareness
of resource instability, to reduce the number of ash trees headed for
landfill and to promote innovative material re-use.
One of the more successful projects featured in IIDEX Woodshop is by
Scott Eunson, whose practice operates at the intersection of art and design.
Eunson’s Burned End-grain Ash Wall Panelling offers an investigation into the
Kona Recliner, Miles Keller
Felix Wedgwood Photography
microscopic structure of ash wood. In a
rigorously detailed process, the physical
properties of ash wood’s molecular structure
are magnified, abstracted in low relief, modelled
with 3-D software, and then cut into the wood
itself using a Computer Numerical Control
(CNC) machine. The resulting wall panel takes
on the formal qualities of a photograph recast
as sculptural object (see page 17), a leveraging
of the documentary impulse to capture the
inherent qualities of material and the complexities of this particular species of wood.
Pattern and form are leitmotifs that inform
much of Eunson’s practice. Interested in the
universality of pattern, whether related to
mathematic, geological, molecular or celestial
geometries, Eunson derives patterns from
pre-existing systems and applies these towards
the production of what he calls an “organic
minimalism.” While he says that these reductive
forms fail at fully exposing macro complexities,
it is the exploration itself that becomes the
productive venture.
What often makes Eunson’s works so
seductive is the realization of a kind of illusionary landscape. The ash wall panelling is a prime
example of this kind of approach, as the pattern
takes on a kind of lunar landscape. It is both
familiar and foreign. This topographical
rendering is partially accomplished via the
blackened surface, which is in fact a burnt
finish. While seemingly at odds with the more
archetypical, unfinished appearance of salvaged
wood projects, the finish is completely natural
and unsealed. According to Eunson, this makes
the carbon essence of the material more
accessible. The burnt surface exposes the
wood’s continuities and invites a light refraction only afforded by the unique attributes of
the fired ash. Engaging a myriad of senses and
further contributing to the otherworldly quality,
the wall panelling also has an acoustic component, as the grooves absorb sound.
Taking a narrative turn, Rob Southcott
and Miles Keller’s projects for IIDEX Woodshop
pay homage to Canadiana. Southcott was
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interested in exploring the wood’s region of
origin, which in this particular instance was
Fort York in Toronto. As Southcott says,
“Fort York started as a concept that referenced
the area from which the material was harvested,
but also referenced the battle which Toronto’s
ash population was confronted with.” The
maquette-like fort recasts familiar iconography
through the lens of a spatial reframing.
This project seems a natural extension of
Southcott’s orotund practice. Collapsing art
and design, Southcott’s works are assemblages
of formal representations that are at once
pared-back and un-ornamented while imbued
with humour, memory and nostalgia. Miles
Keller also takes this approach by marrying
two enduring design typologies—the snowshoe
and the chaise longue. Shrinking down (the
fort) and magnifying (the snowshoe) familiar
structural typologies teases out a new dimension to these immediately recognizable forms,
and in both instances the maker is able to
exploit scale to expose nuances in the scaffold.
As with several other projects at IIDEX
Woodshop, the design for Miles Keller’s Kona
Recliner is derived from the properties of the
wood. Through an intensive research process,
Keller’s team learned that white ash is a
particularly tough native wood with high shock
absorbency, which makes it an ideal material
for tools, baseball bats and hockey sticks. The
cell structure of ash allows the wood to be bent
easily by steam, a process that has yielded many
familiar objects, including snowshoes. Wanting
a challenge, the team decided to design a
sizable object and the chaise provided an
additional opportunity to consider ergonomics.
Experimenting with the mesh seating resulted
in a CNC-cut leather pattern that is akin to the
snowshoe yet circumvents the derivative.
Further exploring the historic trajectory of
traditional ash wood products, Keller used
traditional steam-bending techniques to
produce the frame of the recliner; instead of
using nails and screws, he designed a system of
discrete wooden wedges and ramped slots that
holds the leather in place. Keller recounts that
one of the most interesting experiences during
the design process was being able to handselect the wood from the urban woodlot where
the tree grew and then died, explaining that
urban wood draws elements from the soil, such
as iron, which translate to unique patterns and
colours that might not appear in rural areas.
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Left
Fort York
Rob Southcott
Right
Burned End-grain
Ash Wall Panelling
Scott Eunson
Immediately recognizable in these projects
is that the design, materiality and ideation
operate in tangent. Perhaps this is the appeal
of using repurposed resources, apart from the
obvious “do good” value. Rather than taking
concept from that which is exterior, the nucleus
of the design is derived from the matter, as the
material itself is didactic. A veteran of using
reclaimed materials, Lars Dressler, one-half
of the design duo behind the Brothers Dressler,
explains that using repurposed resources
provides the opportunity to consider layered
provenances. Sharing this perspective, Scott
Eunson notes that the act of reclaiming is about
acknowledging a deep history, and that materials are often permeated by a social patina. It is
through this patina that the material is permitted a kind of agency beyond “tree-ness.”
Noa Bronstein is a curator and researcher based
in Toronto. She has held positions at the Design
Exchange and the Gladstone Hotel and is currently
the Head of Exhibitions and Publications at Gallery
44 Centre for Contemporary Photography.
Donna Bilak
The CRYING of LOT 222
A Victorian Brooch
Deconstructed
Opposite page
Floral dictionary, 1842
Image courtesy Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, University of
Toronto
Top right
19th-century 18kt yellow gold
brooch with garnets
Image courtesy Waddington’s
A SNAPSHOT IN TIME. It was early in the
afternoon on September 9th, 2013, when Lot
222 came up on the block at Waddington’s
Jewellery and Watch Auction in Toronto.
Described in the catalogue as a 19th-century
18kt yellow gold brooch weighing 16 grams, its
oval body was decorated with a simple filigree
pattern embellished with gold granules, its
centre set with faceted purple-toned garnets
arranged to form a six-petalled flower. From
its place in the auction house showroom, this
piece of jewellery evinced silent testimony to a
bygone era by virtue of its design and materials.
If this brooch could talk, what stories would it
have to tell about the society in which it was
worn? Who was its first owner, and how did it
end up for sale in an auction room in southern
Ontario? While we may never know its full
story, the brooch itself constitutes a fascinating
material embodiment of certain 19th-century
cultural trends. Indeed, it was created during
a period of British North American history
distinguished by the Industrial Revolution,
World Fairs, and Grand Tours to Continental
Europe—the technological and cultural
hallmarks of 19th-century society. What makes
this brooch so interesting is that, in fact, it is an
amalgamation of two distinct jewellery genres
popular in Victorian England. Its body reflects
the style known as “archaeological revival,”
which emerged from popular interest in
contemporary archaeological excavations.
Yet the garnet floret embodies what is referred
to as “the language of flowers,” the term used
for the 19th-century social convention of
expressing sentiment by using flowers whose
meanings were codified in floral lexicons.
The use of gold and filigree decoration in
Lot 222 is characteristic of the 19th-century
vogue for souvenir jewellery rendered in the
archaeological revival style, often acquired on
visits to Italy as part of a continental Grand
Tour. Archaeological revival-style jewellery
characteristically featured yellow gold surfaces
embellished with geometric patterns comprised
of gold granules, suggestive of the Etruscan
goldsmithing technique of granulation, as well
as filigree wire twisted into such classic designs
as the egg-and-dart motif, palmettes, and
scrolling or fret-work lines. This genre of
jewellery and the culture of the Grand Tour
intersect in interesting ways. In a period defined
on the one hand by industrial and scientific
achievements, the Victorian fascination with
the past, on the other, was fuelled by an
ongoing series of important archaeological
digs. Notable excavations included the 1859
discovery of the royal tomb of the Egyptian
queen Ahhotep (circa 1560-1530 BC), made at a
time when construction of the Suez Canal
from 1859 to 1869 drew attention to Egypt’s
ancient past. In Italy, significant caches of
Etruscan jewellery were excavated from three
different tomb sites dating from the 7th century
BC: the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Cerveteri
(1836), as well as the Barberini tomb (1855) and
the Bernardini tomb (1876) at Palestrina. In 1873,
Mycenaean gold treasures were discovered in
Asia Minor by Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy
and self-educated merchant-turned-archaeologist who believed he had found the fabled
ancient city of Troy.
The Victorians also experienced classical
antiquity through the Grand Tour, a fashionable
educational experience embraced in particular
by affluent British classes in the 18th century.
Indeed, British Grand Tourists collected
voraciously on their trips, and while Napoleonic
wars interrupted such excursions, recreational
travel around the Continent resumed after 1814.
For Victorian tourists, the Castellani atelier in
Rome was an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour,
where ancient jewellery was on display and
exquisite reproductions made by the firm could
be purchased by visitors as a memento of their
trip. Founded by Fortunato Pio Castellani
(1794-1865), the firm was managed by his two
sons, Alessandro (1823-1883) and Augusto
(1829-1914), after he retired in 1852. Castellani
became the most influential firm working in
what became known as the archaeological
revival style, which generally fell into two
stylistic categories: close copies of the ancient
original or fanciful interpretations. The
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Spring Summer 2014 | 19
jewellery creations by Castellani essentially set
the standard for this genre, and the firm’s rise to
international fame was rooted in their participation in the excavation of Etruscan tombs during
the 1830s, which yielded exquisitely wrought
gold jewellery among other ancient artifacts.
Because the Castellani kept abreast of archaeological discoveries, they were able to amass an
extensive collection of Etruscan, Greek and
Roman pieces, which they studied and copied,
and the firm caused a sensation with their
display of Etruscan-style jewellery at the
London World Exhibition of 1862.
From a material standpoint, Lot 222 reflects
the (then) newfound availability of gold in
19th-century Europe in the smooth expanse of
its surface use, while its gold embellishments
(the granule beads and twisted wire filigree)
articulated classical motifs from the decorative
repertoire of antiquity. During the period in
which Lot 222 was created, jewellery rendered
entirely in gold constituted a novelty, at a time
when earlier 19th-century wars and campaigns
had depleted European reserves. This situation
changed with Californian and Australian gold
discoveries in 1849 and 1851 respectively, so
that by the 1860s, a significant increase in the
availability of gold marked the production
of revival-style jewellery.
With regard to the gold work in Lot 222, its
central garnet floret appears incongruous with
the archaeological revival idiom in which the
body of the brooch is rendered. This is because
the central floret is, without doubt, from an
entirely different piece of jewellery. Even though
the scale of the garnet floret is well matched to
fit the concave centre of the brooch in terms of
width and height, it looks to have been either
superimposed upon, or have replaced, a
pre-existing central element whose edge can
still be seen in the photograph as a repeating
pattern of gold granule beads set between
scallop shapes. This purple-toned garnet floret
also has a particular story to tell about 19thcentury society, for it is designed as a pansy,
also known as “heart’s ease.” According to the
Victorian language of flowers—the sophisticated,
encoded floral vocabulary that governed flower
arrangements used by Victorians to articulate
feelings and emotions—the pansy signaled
“think of me,” derived from the French verb
penser, “to think.” Floral dictionaries were
popular publications throughout the 19th
century on both sides of the Atlantic. These
19th-century brooch
Image courtesy Waddington’s
small, pocket-sized books, were collected and
admired in England and North America, and
were frequently given as gifts between women.
The morphology of the pansy flower is based
upon six heart-shaped petals: two large and
overlapping petals comprise its top; two side
petals fill out the left and right side of the
flower’s face; and the lowermost petal is
positioned front and centre. The arrangement
of the six gemstones in Lot 222’s floret presents
a symmetrical interpretation of the pansy;
the triangular shape of the garnets evokes the
heart-shape of the flower’s petals. A verse from
the 1840 edition of the floral dictionary The
Sentiment of Flowers, or, Language of Flora thusly
summarizes its praise, “...the garden’s gem: |
Heart’s-ease, like a gallant bold, | In his cloth
of purple and gold…” and also comments on the
pansy’s many variations in colour.1 Flower
dictionaries also instructed the reader in ways
to create flower arrangements to express
specific messages between sender and recipient. On this point, the 1878 floral dictionary
The Language of Flowers and Floral Conversation
The Language of Flowers
and Floral Conversation
by Charles W. Seelye, 1878
Image courtesy Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, University of
Toronto
provides diverse examples. For example,
to say “Your modesty and moral and intellectual
worth inspire my love and devotion” you would
assemble a posy containing sweet violet
(for “Modesty”), mignonette (“Moral and
Intellectual Worth”), lavender, or red rosebud
(“Confession of Love”), and heliotrope
(“Devotion”).2 Conversely, “I disdain a fop”
required a yellow carnation to articulate
“Disdain,” in combination with the cockscomb,
signifying “A fop.”3 While hugely popular, floral
dictionaries were not standardized in all
meanings and nuances of meanings, and the
recipient of a floral message would have had
to be certain of the floral dictionary used in
its composition. However, certain flowers did
have fixed meaning, such as rosemary for
remembrance, ivy for friendship, pansy for
thoughts, and the eponymous forget-me-not.
The forget-me-not provides a useful case
study about the flexibility of the Victorian
language of flowers as transposed in jewellery.
A small, five-petalled bright blue flower, the
forget-me-not was a popular motif in 19thcentury pins, rings, bracelets, lockets, and
earrings. The bright blue colour of this flower
was rendered either in cabochon-cut turquoise
stone or turquoise-coloured enamel. Jewelled
forget-me-not pieces were often given as tokens
of love and/or friendship. Notably, the “forgetme-not” sentiment could be conveyed not
only by the flower but also by its distinctive
turquoise blue colour.
The following two examples of 19th-century
brooches aptly illustrate how forget-me-not
flower jewellery played with form and colour
to express meaning. On the one hand, we see a
brooch designed as an oval-shaped floral frame
comprised of generic white and yellow gold
flowers interspersed with crescent shapes,
which forms the setting for a piece of polished
pearly-white agate that has a decorative flower
design riveted to it made from gold and set with
turquoise stones. Interestingly, this particular
brooch evokes the idea of the forget-me-not
flower through colour, conveyed by the
turquoise cabochons, as the floral design itself
is not botanically accurate. On the other hand,
and in contrast, the example of the rectangularshaped mourning brooch features a forget-menot spray rendered in seed pearls set into a
black onyx background framed by a scrolling,
ribbon-like gold border. Here, the flower is
immediately recognizable as the forget-me-not
by virtue of its faithful depiction of form, yet
its characteristic blue colour is absent. As a
piece of jewellery created to commemorate
a deceased loved one, the replacement of the
forget-me-not blue with white, the colour of
innocence and purity, assumes heightened
significance against the black onyx background,
the traditional colour of mourning.
The garnet floret in Lot 222 participates in
this Victorian culture of floral signification,
and the brooch itself serves as a physical
embodiment of sentiment and memory. It may
indeed have been a piece of souvenir jewellery
acquired during travel, or perhaps purchased at
a boutique in England. Moreover, 19th-century
jewellery catalogues included an array of
archaeological revival-style pieces as part of
the stock in trade. Evocative of the Victorian
interest in the classical past, and an eloquent
expression of the popular sentiment “think of
me” conveyed by the pansy floret, Lot 222
presents us with a fusion of genres as well as a
customized statement of emotion. That said, it
is difficult to ascertain when this marriage of
styles was made, though it likely occurred
during the late 19th or early 20th century. But
this much is certain: at some point, some owner
wished to personalize this piece, possibly
taking the garnet floret from a ring or pin and
having a jeweller join it to the brooch. As an
object lesson, this is what a reading of the
design and the materials of Lot 222 tells us.
The human element (the interwoven acts of
acquiring-giving-receiving-wearing) is more
difficult to recreate, yet this is what imparts
meaning to the object. While much of the
personal story of Lot 222 has been lost in the
transit of time, this brooch is like a jewelled
time capsule of events and ideas of a
past world.
Donna Bilak holds a PhD from the Bard Graduate
Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material
Culture (NYC).
Notes
1 Anonymous, The Sentiment of Flowers, or, Language of
Flora. Embracing an Account of Nearly Three-Hundred
Different Flowers, with their Powers in Language
(Philadelphia:Lea & Blanchard, 1840), 234-5.
2 Charles W. Seelye, The Language of Flowers and Floral
Conversation (Rochester, 1878), 60.
3Ibid.
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Spring Summer 2014 | 21
LINKING HUMAN
to NATURE
and HAND
to MACHINE
Marian Bantjes’s Designs
Brian Donnelly
Images by
Marian Bantjes
Opposite page
How Are You
Ballpoint pen/digital
March 2006
Top right
I Want It All
Peony petals
June 2006
HISTORY SUGGESTS THAT even the
most unexpected twists and turns never come
completely from nowhere. Narratives of the
career of designer and artist Marian Bantjes
always note her sudden rise, “bursting” onto
the scene in 2003, an overnight sensation at age
40. Her commitment to pattern and ornament
combines in a fresh style that places her both
alongside the stars of the design world and
somehow a little to one side, on the outside,
or even heading in the opposite direction.
Bantjes has been called a “designer’s
designer,” but she also refers to herself as
outside of the mainstream in design, as though
her independence and insistence on personal
expression place her in another category
entirely—not strictly a communication or
graphic designer, but not quite an illustrator
either. She prefers the term “graphic artist,”
in recognition of her ongoing attempt to do
the impossible: “make a living doing something
that I loved.” Meanwhile, critical response from
one of the leading lights in the design field,
Rick Valicenti, sums her up as, “Perhaps the
most important, conceptually complete
designer of our time.”
Her background incorporates abrupt shifts.
After a year at Emily Carr University of Art
and Design in Vancouver, she stumbled into
a job with book publisher Hartley and Marks,
working as a typesetter. She was taught to
follow instructions “to the letter,” correcting
technical details the designer overlooked;
this was, she notes, “in no way a creative
process.” Ten years there led to another
professional challenge as a founding partner
in a rapidly growing and busy design firm,
Digitopolis. After a decade, she took a buyout
to afford herself a sabbatical, and immediately
began to work in the curvaceous and florid
style that catapulted her to success, rendered
in her own hand and on her own terms.
Despite the fame and acclaim she has earned,
it can be hard to easily reconcile her work with
the logic, rigour and geometry we most often
associate with graphic design and professional
visual communication. The elements of the
page—the use of colour, the rhythm and flow
of the layout and the cropped shapes of the
photographs, even the shapes of the letterforms
themselves—are all abstract elements, something we may overlook in our rush to understand the message and get the “meaning.”
The open-ended nature of non-representational
or evocative form would seem to make the
central visual concern of design a matter of
purely aesthetic distinction and a careful and
pleasing sense of order. But you won’t get far
telling senior art directors or large corporate
clients to buy your idea because you think it
just looks really good.
More likely, the struggle to control and
discipline the essentially abstract nature of
design explains why professionals are at such
pains to assert that research, logic and a clear
rationale are the true principles of good work.
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Spring Summer 2014 | 23
Michael Bantjes
Vector, pencil and photograph
2008
Beauty and pleasure were rendered anathema
by machines and the modern sometime in the
1960s (much earlier in Europe); the postmodern
served up a riot of shape and historical pastiche,
but all in the name of an anti-aesthetic. No one
has yet made the design world truly safe for
playful curves, vegetative ornament, and
beautifully obsessive detail. Bantjes has
certainly challenged the confidence of design’s
paradigms, even if it’s hard to argue they have
yet been supplanted.
Her work broke out quickly and forcefully
in the mid-2000s because it was both visually
pleasing and structurally coherent and
convincing. It uses references to history and
the decorative canon in such an overwhelming
and confident way that you can’t help but get
it. The familiar gets reworked so thoroughly
it bypasses your critical filters to work directly
on the visual pleasure centres, like a flood
of dopamine.
Bantjes is aware of the potential side effects
of playing with feel-good visual drugs. She told
an interviewer that, “I’m terrified of the hordes
(of mostly young women) who love [her work,
but also] unicorns and fairies and hearts.”
But Bantjes very rarely falls properly into the
categories of kitsch or Disney; there is usually
more than enough visual thinking and edgy
complexity to reward, even compel, close
looking and careful appreciation.
Her radical calligraphy (normally a
conservative and minor genre within design)
variously evokes plant tendrils, heart and skulls,
arabesques, Arabic calligraphy and tiling,
medical illustrations, symbolist art, First
Nations graphic patterns, tattoos and needlepoint, hot rods and eyelet lace, octopus
tentacles, Nintendo, Murakami, baroque
architectural details, medieval manuscripts
and Gothic blackletter, Aesthetic Movement
interiors, and even the geometry of art deco
and the Dutch modernist avant-garde.
Clients include magazines and book
publishers (she designed her own artist’s book,
I Wonder, published in 2010); paper company
promotions and wrapping papers; clothing
designs and retailers from Saks Fifth Avenue
to snowboarding companies; art galleries, small
companies and individuals, not for profit events
and enterprises, and commissioned work from
other well-established and well-known
designers, many in the United States.
She works on the digital screen, largely
in vector-based software that unleashes her
uncanny knack for curves; but also by hand,
in ink, pencil and ballpoint pen; sometimes
in oil paint; or with letterforms from leaves
nibbled and shaped by her fingernails. Grains
of sugar swirl about, blurring the boundary
between word and pattern; even nail polish
and laser burning in wood have been incorporated. Bantjes famously “typeset” the phrase
“I want it all” using fallen peony leaves.
(This last work, she notes, “smelled fantastic.”)
Indeed, the direct use of natural materials,
shapes and motifs is perhaps what places her
farthest outside the current mainstream, as
pixels and algorithms have propelled design
far from the “natural” (now necessarily
rendered in quotes) into the virtual and
manmade. Her intention is not to regress,
however, or devolve back to nature (although
she does now live on bucolic Bowen Island).
She has stated that she wants to “resurrect
motifs that had been abandoned by modernism…without being nostalgic.”
And always, in the motifs she reclaims,
one finds vegetative imagery, and sometimes
actual flora arranged into letter forms, at the
Identity and call for entries
for Graphex Awards 2006
September 2005
forefront. Bantjes’s work suggests it has always
been easier and perhaps more convincing
to celebrate the sheer visual pleasure of the
natural world in expressive design than in the
self-critical and anti-aesthetic precincts of
contemporary art. She also demonstrates how
the sheer visual variety of botany is easier to
integrate across the spectrum of challenges
and assignments in the typical design practice.
Like most designers, Bantjes shows she is
free to adopt and adapt ornamental, natural
inspiration in a wide variety of ways. Floral and
vegetative patterns arise more naturally, as it
were, in solving communication problems than
in forging the often restricted signature styles
of individual artists.
For all her natural sources, however,
Bantjes is disinclined to accept commissions
from those who see her work as merely “type
with a bunch of bullshit curlicues coming off it.”
(She liberally uses earthy language as well.)
She notes that early on, her work backed away
from arabesques, allowing her to work through
ornament while resisting “pretty things for
pretty subjects.” Always, there is a structure
underneath her pieces, and her goals are to
showcase visual invention and invoke such
seemingly anti-modern attitudes as curiosity,
wonder, joy, surprise, and humour.
Her originality and independence, in other
words, are not purely in the name of style or
simple visual pleasure. She has commented
on her appreciation for the social and political
ideals that underlay the machines and mass
production of modernism. She looks to the
past, and natural inspiration, to dig deep into
designers’ motives, not just as a source of
forms to copy. Perhaps through her sheer
invention, Marian Bantjes can teach us to leap
over the functionalist rejection of ornament
and find something approaching a “utopian…
earnestly hopeful outlook,” linking hand to
machine, and human to nature.
Bantjes has written and published a monograph and
catalogue résumé of her work. See Marian Bantjes,
Pretty Pictures (New York: Metropolis Books, 2013).
Brian Donnelly is Professor in the Faculty of
Animation, Arts and Design at Sheridan College in
Oakville, Ontario. He holds a BFA in fine art, a PhD
in art history, and was a practising designer in a
variety of roles for fifteen years.
ornamentum
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Spring Summer 2014 | 25
Spotlight on the Collection
A FLOWERING PASSION
for PORCELAIN
George and Helen Gardiner
Rachel Gotlieb
Rachel Gotlieb
COLLECTORS ARE MOTIVATED to collect
for myriad reasons that often overlap: for
personal pleasure, scholarship and edification,
preservation and prosperity, and for financial
investment. George and Helen Gardiner, the
founders of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic
Art in Toronto, which opened thirty years ago
on March 6, 1984, collected for all these reasons
and more. Most importantly, and typical of most
collectors, they had a passion for a particular
medium, in their case ceramics. They deliberately chose to specialize, allowing them to
collect with focus and in depth, rather than
build an encyclopedic collection illustrating
the history of world ceramics. This manner of
collecting has been in favour since the nineteenth century. However, what is remarkable
about the Gardiners is that their collecting
taste covered a wide temporal, material and
geographic range: pottery from Ancient
America, sixteenth-century Italian Maiolica,
seventeenth-century tin-glaze English
Deftware, eighteenth-century German Meissen,
Austrian Du Paquier, French Sèvres and English
Chelsea, Bow, Worcester and Derby porcelain
comprised their collecting purview. They also
Opposite page
Pair of plates from a named
botanical dessert service
New China Derby Works
English, circa 1796-1805
Attributed to
William “Quaker” Pegg
Soft-paste porcelain, enamel,
and gold: 3.2 x 23.2 cm
Origin: Derby,
Derbyshire, England
Gardiner Museum
Gift of George
and Helen Gardiner,
G83.1.1126.1-2
concentrated on specific forms, amassing
one of the world’s largest and finest public
collections of eighteenth-century rococo
porcelain perfume bottles and commedia dell’arte
figures. George Gardiner served on the board
of the Harlequin publishing house, hence his
attraction to the dramatic form and the
mischievous Harlequin character who played
a starring role in the Commedia series.
Remarkably, the Gardiners made the
decision to gift the collection to the nation
and build a museum. When a collection is
transformed from a private collection to a
public institution, new meanings unfold.1
For example, the Gardiners had a penchant
for the colour yellow, and their personal taste
influenced their decision-making so much that,
to this day, many Gardiner Museum visitors
ask if yellow was a popular colour amongst
eighteenth-century porcelain manufacturers
and consumers. The answer is no, just one
preferred by the original collectors and
founders of the museum.
A pair of delightful botanical plates made
by New China Derby Works between circa
1796-1805, a manufacturer operated by
William Duesberry II, evidences the Gardiners’
privileging of the colour yellow. The Gardiners
purchased the plates from a London antique
store in 1979. One plate is filled with lush
renderings of rose buds, and the other with
tulips, and both are encircled by brilliant yellow
ground rims with plain and foliate wreaths in
gilt. They are signed in blue on the back with
the names of the flowers, “Moss Rose Buds”
and “Tulips,” respectively.
New China Derby Works specialized in large
dinner and dessert services featuring named,
hand-painted topographical views of Derby or
botanical images. The dessert course was a
potent sign of elite status in the eighteenth
century because it was a luxury affordable to
few, as was the medium of porcelain since the
material was extremely difficult and expensive
to make. A dessert service in the late eighteenth
century typically comprised 24 plates, two
covered tureens for sugar and cream with
stands and ladles, 13 compotiers or serving
dishes, footed centre dishes, ice pails and ice
cups. Desserts included ice creams, nuts such
as pistachios, walnuts and chestnuts, and fruit
including apricots, pineapples, plums, grapes
and pears. The fresh fruit often came from
the owner’s hot houses, and represented yet
another symbol of status and wealth.
These two plates reproduced here come
from “Pattern 216,” which was in production
for approximately ten years, and are attributed
to a leading flower painter, William “Quaker”
Pegg (1775-1851). Pegg was active between 1796
and 1801, and he most likely drew upon contemporary botanical illustrations from William
Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, which Duesberry
purchased in 1787 to serve as sources for
Derby’s china painters.2 Interestingly, Pegg’s
father was a gardener who worked at Etwall Hall
near Derby.3 The younger Pegg apprenticed at
the Potteries in Staffordshire as a china painter.
When he heard John Wesley preach at Hanley
in Staffordshire, he left the Baptist Church and
joined the Society of Friends. Because of his
religious beliefs, which discouraged ornamentation as it was perceived as a form of vanity,
he stopped decorating and worked instead at
a stocking manufacturer. Fortunately, however,
he returned to china painting in 1813.
In all, the Gardiners bought 16 yellow-ground
botanical pieces of dessert tableware by New
China Derby Works to create a small service.
The pieces are currently on display at the
Gardiner Museum for all to enjoy.
Rachel Gotlieb is Chief Curator at the Gardiner
Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto.
Notes
1 Ruth Formanek,“Why they Collect; collectors reveal
their motivations,” in Susan M. Pearce, Museums,
Objects and Collections (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992), 334-5.
2 Patricia Ferguson, “The Nature of Dessert,”
Potpourri (Fall 1999), 7.
3 John Murdoch, John Twitchett, Painters and the
Derby China Works (Trefoil: London, 1987), 62.
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Spring Summer 2014 | 27
Opposite page top
Opposite page left
Below
Emily Carr University of Art
and Design coat of arms
First issue of Woo Magazine
2010
Emily Carr University
of Art and Design
Image courtesy Woo Magazine
EYE, MIND,
and HAND
in EVOLUTION
Emily Carr College of Art (1978)
Sam Carter
“ EYE, MIND, AND HAND” is the motto of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design coat of arms.
“The crow is the smaller cousin of the raven, but unlike the raven, is at home in urban areas...As well,
they [crows] are noted for their intelligence, and thus symbolize the intellectual quotient in all
aesthetic endeavours.”1
Emily Carr is widely regarded as the dominant figure in British Columbia art in the first half of the
20th century. Perhaps this is why BC politicians championed the idea of the Vancouver School of Arts’
new name honouring Carr as the province’s most significant artist of the day. Although she was
associated with the Group of Seven artists, and close to Frederick Varley and Lawren Harris, both
early modernists, she was never a member of this now classic group.
It would be interesting to know what Carr would have thought about the Emily Carr University of
Art and Design today. In 1898 Carr made the first of many now legendary sketching and painting trips
to Aboriginal villages on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I think she would have been pleased with
the recognition and inclusion of First Nations’ art and design studies, current emphasis on “green”
practice and application, not to mention the significant number of women instructors on staff. There
is no doubt also that she would be amazed by the modern use of digital tools and their ubiquitous
influence on local and global art and culture.
Although Emily Carr never taught at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, her
spirit, art, intellect, and popular lore played an important role in the development of culture in BC
and Canada during the 1920s. Her presence continues even now, made obvious in material form by
Woo, the student publication, playfully named after her pet monkey.
Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (1925)
In 1926, Charles Hepburn Scott, a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art (1909), was appointed first
director of the Vancouver School. Jock Macdonald, graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, Italian
sculptor Charles Marega, painter Kate Hoole, and Scott’s sister-in-law Grace Melvin, also from the
Glasgow School, and Frederick Varley, a founding member of the Group of Seven, were all hired by
Scott. As might be expected, Scott and Melvin brought with them from Glasgow the aesthetics and
interests of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the Arts and Crafts movement, Japonism, and Art Nouveau.
Writer Louise Aird in her blog (louiseaird.com) noted that, “Varley and Macdonald indignantly resigned
from the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts and opened the BC College of Arts, taking
half the student body with them.” Historian Joyce Zemans described the curriculum in these words:
“The school [BC College of Arts] was dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to the arts and to the
integration of eastern and western philosophy. Music flowed through the studios and metaphysics
dominated the discussions.”2
Vancouver School of Art (1933)
The Depression, World War II, and limited
resources all had a profound effect upon
talented students and teachers through the
1930s and into the immediate post-war period,
when painting flourished as abstraction became
known to the students through instructors such
as Gordon Smith and Jack Shadbolt.
Perspectives changed again when Fred
Amess became principal upon the retirement
of Charles Scott. He believed in the importance
of crafts and hired ceramists such as Reg Dixon
and David Lambert who took promising
students to St. Ives in England to study with
their mentor Bernard Leach. Soon, a new
building in the sixties brought modernism and
large open studios, skylights, high ceilings, and
well-equipped workshops, along with hard-edge
abstraction, while pop and op art soon found a
place in the studios. At the same time, practices
were becoming increasingly multidisciplinary
with photography and film animation, performance, and installation art. Grading was largely
eliminated; formal drawing classes and art
history were optional.
When the Vanc.ouver School of Art was
renamed the Emily Carr College of Art in 1978,
faculty and students of the time protested the
new name. It was felt that Carr’s name did not
represent the contemporary nature of the
school as it moved into new premises on
Granville Island. By the late 1980s, the Granville
Island premises were too small to accommodate
the burgeoning number of students. The south
building was added in 1994, providing for a
larger library to acknowledge the new degreegranting status (Bachelor of Fine Arts and
Bachelor of Design), which brought about
another change of name from College to
Institute (now University) during this period
of growth and much greater visibility. If the
1980s had focused on issues of gender, the
1990s emphasized cultural diversity and sexual
orientation. A student exchange program
began; technology became the primary toolbox
for design and media practices as the commitment to the digital world began to redefine
the university’s place in culture, art, and
commerce, with innovative and experimental
courses and approaches as suggested by the
student profiles included here.
Sam Carter is professor emeritus at Emily Carr
University of Art and Design, Vancouver, British
Columbia.
Notes
1 Concept and design, Susan Point, 2007;
from www.gg.ca.
2 75 Years of Collecting; from http://projects.
vanartgallery.bc.ca./publications/75years/pdf/
Macdonald_Jock_39.pdf.
ornamentum
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Spring Summer 2014 | 29
STUDENT PROFILES
Left to right
Katherine So
Nouveau Collection, 2012
Photograph by Shimon Karmel
Ian Nakamoto
Charlotte Kennedy
and Romney Shipway
Xwalacktun (Rick) Harry, an
ECUAD graduate, gives a carving
demonstration at the Aboriginal
Gathering Place at the Granville
Island campus.
Photograph courtesy Aboriginal
Gathering Place, ECUAD
Katherine Soucie
ECUAD graduate, Master of Applied Arts
As a professional trained in fashion design
and textiles prior to my studies at ECUAD,
I had completed my BFA in printmaking and
sculpture in 2009. It was during this time that
the Intersections Digital Media Studios
acquired an industrial embroidery machine.
From here, I found myself enrolled in the MAA,
Master of Applied Arts program, 2010-2013.
This decision encouraged an ability to combine
my professional studio practice with research
meant to explore concepts and applications
for waste materials through acts of mending.
The next generation at ECUAD can look
forward to being in an environment in which
creative thinking will lead down pathways that
offer up opportunities never imagined.
Charlotte Kennedy
and Romney Shipway
Fourth-year students, Industrial Design
“The Three Stool” was a third-year collaborative
industrial design project with the goal of using
the least amount of material (western maple)
to create maximum strength. In our practice,
we consider the environmental impacts
holistically in evaluating not only the quantity
of material consumption but also the material
itself and the processes used to create it.
We feel that the experience at the Great
Northern Way campus will build upon the
creative workspace that is present at Emily Carr,
but on a larger scale. It will offer a platform and
comfortable space for people to work together
in defining their art and design practices and
creating a community around them.
Ian Nakamoto
Lee-ann Neel
Fourth-year student, Animation
Third-year student, Visual Arts
I’ve always been fascinated by the Soviet school
of sculpting, particularly the work coming out
of the Stroganov school in the 1970s, which was
built around the idea of sculpture being a kind
of stylized, almost architectural interpretation
of the human body.
My practice has become evenly split between
two disciplines: traditional sculpting and 3-D
modelling for computer animation. I want to
merge the two in my work. I hope that in the
design of the new Great Northern Way campus
now under development (2014-2017), an even
stronger dialogue with students and industry
professionals may be encouraged.
Over the past three years at ECUAD,
I have had an opportunity to strengthen my
traditional arts while learning from new
materials, techniques, and cultural theory
courses. My artistic practice includes traditional
Kwakwaka’wakw-style button blankets,
woodcarving, jewellery, and painting, and
I am currently apprenticing in both wool
and cedar bark weaving.
My hopes for the future are continued
growth of the Aboriginal student population,
and curriculum that reflects their diverse
artistic practices.
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Spring Summer 2014 | 31
2-5 OCTOBER 2014
32nd Annual Canadian Society of
Decorative Arts Symposium
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario
Visit www.csda-ccad.org for details
ornamentum
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Spring Summer 2014 | 33
What to See
Decorative Arts Exhibitions across Canada
VICTORIA
Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria
aggv.ca
Tel: (250) 384-4171
ALTERNATIVE VISIONS:
RENDITIONS OF
MYTH, LEGEND AND
FOLK TALES FROM
CHINA AND JAPAN
This exhibition explores
the portrayal of
myths and legends in
Japanese and Chinese
arts and crafts, in
various media, from
paintings, prints and
textiles to sculptures.
To June 15, 2014
SASKATOON
Ukranian Museum
of Canada
umc.sk.ca
Tel: (306) 244-3800
MOVED BY THE SPIRIT
This exhibition includes
works by twelve artists
interpreting the life
of Jesus through
textiles, glass, book
arts, ceramics,
jewellery, wood, stained
glass, painting and
religious icons.
To June 21, 2014
MONTREAL
AROUND 1914: DESIGN
IN A NEW AGE
Claret jug
Designed under the
supervision of Albert Mayer
(German, 1867-1944)
Silver-plate, green glass,
circa 1900-1905
Ht: 36.3 W: 20.6 D: 15.9 cm
Gift of Mrs. Harry Davidson
Image courtesy ROM
outstanding sculptures
by Inuit artists in the
permanent collection
of the WAG. Most of
the sculptures have
subject matter relating
to traditional shamanic
legends and beliefs.
To December 31, 2015
TORONTO
Manitoba Craft Council
manitobacraft.ca
Tel: (204) 946-0803
SHARON LOEPPKY
Sharon Loeppky’s
current ceramic mosaic
work documents the
landscape around her
Manitoba home and
workshop, on the bank
of a small creek.
To June 27, 2014
Royal Ontario Museum
rom.on.ca
Tel: (416) 586-8000
AROUND 1914:
DESIGN IN A NEW AGE
This exhibition
explores a pivotal
period of innovation
and experimentation
as artists struggled to
reconcile quality design
with the emergence
of mass production,
and the new materials
made available with
technology. Works
on display include
key designers of this
era, such as Charles
Rennie Mackintosh,
Louis Comfort Tiffany,
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Georg Jensen, and
Walter Gropius.
To March 21, 2015
Winnipeg Art Gallery
wag.ca
Tel: (204) 786-6641
HIGHLIGHTS OF
INUIT SCULPTURE
This exhibition
features some of the
BORN OF THE INDIAN
OCEAN: THE SILKS
OF MADAGASCAR
The Royal Ontario
Museum is home to
one of the world's
best collections of
WINNIPEG
Advertise in
the Gallery
silks from highland
Madagascar. This exhibit
takes advantage of this
unparalleled collection
to explore wildly coloured
and patterned 19thcentury wraps known
as akotifahana. Great
works of art, these
cloths also had great
ceremonial value.
To August 4, 2014
100 YEARS OF
COLLECTING
On March 19, 1914,
the Duke of Connaught
officially opened the
doors of the Royal
Ontario Museum for the
first time. This exhibition
celebrates 100 years of
collecting by the ROM,
through unique and
interesting objects.
To March 29, 2015
Gardiner Museum
gardinermuseum.on.ca
Tel: (416) 586-8080
A TRIBUTE TO
GEORGE AND HELEN
GARDINER & THE JOY
OF COLLECTING
These two 30thanniversary exhibitions
pay homage to museum
founders George and
Helen Gardiner, as well
as to the significant
collectors who have
donated their collections
or exceptional pieces
to the museum.
To January 11, 2015
Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts
mbam.qc.ca
Tel: (514) 285-2000
FABERGÉ: JEWELLER
TO THE CZARS
This exhibition features
approximately 240
objects, including four of
the most famous Easter
eggs commissioned
by the Romanovs and
enamelled picture
frames, clocks, gold
cigarette cases and
knobs for walking canes,
rock-crystal flowers,
caskets and brooches.
June 14 to October 5,
2014
FREDERICTON
Beaverbrook Art Gallery
beaverbrookartgallery.org
Tel: (506) 458-2028
NEW BRUNSWICK
COLLEGE OF CRAFT
AND DESIGN
GRADUATION
EXHIBITION 2014
This exhibition
celebrates the creativity
of graduates from the
New Brunswick College
of Craft and Design
and features work
from various diploma
programs: Ceramics,
Jewellery and Metal Arts,
Fashion Design, Textile
Design, Photography,
Graphic Design,
Integrated Media, and
Aboriginal Visual Arts.
June 1-15, 2014
ST. JOHN’S
Craft Council of
Newfoundland
and Labrador
craftcouncil.nl/ca
Tel: (709) 753-2749
CROQUIS: FULLY
RENDERED DESIGN
WITHOUT REPEATS
A solo exhibition of
Jacquard-woven
upholstery cloth featuring
hand-drawn, curvilinear
imagery designed for
individual pieces of
antique furniture.
To June 14, 2014
ANNUAL MEMBERS
EXHIBIT
An exhibition of
contemporary craft
from across the
province, with awards to
celebrate excellence in
innovation and design.
June 28, 2014 to
August 23, 2014
COLLECT
A group show featuring
vessels, sculpture
and imagery reflecting
Newfoundland and
Labrador in a variety
of media to inspire
any collector.
June 28, 2014 to
August 23, 2014
FABERGÉ: JEWELLER
TO THE CZARS
Imperial Tsesarevich
Easter Egg
Peter Carl Fabergé,
1912 Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts, Bequest of
Lillian Thomas Pratt.
Photograph: Katherine Wetzel
Ornamentum’s gallery is a valuable marketplace for collectors and dealers to showcase
antiques, decorative arts, and professional services. Be seen and connect with others who
appreciate the decorative arts. Contact John Fleming at (416) 324-8347.
Canadian magazines are u niqu e.
And so are you. That’s why we publish hundreds of titles, so you know there’s one just for you. All
you have to do is head to the newsstands, look for the Genuine Canadian Magazine icon marking
truly Canadian publications and start reading. It’s that easy.
Visit magazinescanada.ca/ns and newsstands to find your new favourite magazine.
Peter E. Baker
Antiquaire depuis/since 1976
1119 2nd Concession, Elgin, Québec J0S 2E0
www.peterbakerantiques.com (450) 264-6794
Decorate with Distinction
Several examples of our current inventory of 19th-century sponge decorated earthenware made for the Quebec market, circa 1875:
Maple Leaf, Rosette, Peony, and Maple Leaf with flower. Other examples (including a Peony cup and saucer) also in stock.