Territories in Metal

Review by
Denis Longchamps

Director of the Canadian Clay and Glass Museum

In the historical overview essay for the Inaugural Canadian Craft Biennial, craft historian and scholar Sandra Alfoldy writes that “craft today continues to embrace its material and technical roots while throwing the doors wide open to new approaches and identities. What has never changed is that skill is essential, and labour intensive practices remain the lot of the craftperson.” The exhibition Territories makes no exception. It presents the works of Brigitte Clavette, Chantal Gilbert, Lou Lynn and Silvia Taylor who all work with metal and the inclusion of other materials. For one, it is found objects, for another it is bones and wood, and yet for the others it is the incorporation of glass. Nonetheless, the four of them have developed a distinctive visual language each with personal approaches exploring conceptual and technical territories. Underlying their creations are themes of memory, archeology and history overlapped in an investigation of the poetics and realities of daily life on an individual level and as well as a society on a whole.

Brigitte Clavette offers for the contemplation of enjoyment and consumption, Futile Abundance (2018), a series of twelve tableaux. This new body of work follows Wasted (2017) presented in the Canadian Craft Biennial National Exhibition, in Burlington, and A Table (2013) shown at Design Xchange, Toronto—both pieces are also included in Territories. In the words of CBC art critic, matt is not a critic as far as I know, but a filmaker…Matthew Brown, “Clavette is an alchemist turning things we waste into actual silver...her intention with this work is to create an atmosphere or feeling of wealth and opulence—of attraction and repulsion.” Her working process involves four distinct steps. First, she hammers the small silver bowls, can we say that I call them ‘silver skins’? then she casts the organic materials she finds on walks and hikes or given to by a friend or a colleague. All along she fills the pages of her drawing pad with watercolour and ink sketches. Lastly, she creates the final works from the stock she has accumulated. Do you think ..’then she casts’..is clear enough? Casts in silver? Lost wax, cire perdue?

In the original piece of the series, A Table, we note a partial metal plate rusting with tarnished and broken utensils and what appears to be left over food in shining silver, all set on a 12 x 18 inches paper acting as a placemat on which was drawn the original full plate. For Wasted, she used 1,861 grams of silver to cast rotten food to highlight the waste and excess that surrounds us in our daily life. Writer and artist Amélie Marois writes that “in this way, the food doesn’t feed the body anymore, it feeds the social conscience of the maker,” and hopefully of the viewer.

These two works were the premise for Futile Abundance where “she takes found objects from animal parts to wasted food and turns them into objects of opulence.” The tableaux, created as centrepieces, are all mounted upon 14 x 28 inches watercolour and ink drawings on paper that serve as placemats integral to the work as well as “recycling” a powerful message from A Table.

In Spirit, the drawing has been cut into strips and then woven. On it, rests the wing of a crow, its skeleton head cast in gold, the crow skull is real and covered in tarnised silver leaf. holding in its beak a string of black pearls. Clavette says that it is “streaming like oil spent on the landscape.” Here the discourse has expanded to include environmental issues. Similarly, in Silent Witness, the golden skeleton head of a muskrat sits on the edge of a burnt shelter in a landscape where beads look like charred remains of what used to exist. Thus, with each piece of the series, she invites the viewer to question abundance, the way we get it and its purpose in life, to examine our daily rituals and routines, and to consider our wastefulness. The questioning is both personal and political.