On a sun-drenched June day three years ago, eight artists walked from Vancouver’s Spanish Banks to the secluded southern shores of Point Grey. There, on Wreck Beach, the women — accomplished painters, performers, and poets in their 60s, 70s and 80s — triumphed over at least two taboos.
They shed their clothing for a day-long nude photoshoot, and established a beachhead for beauty beyond the clichés of nubile allure.
The result of their full-frontal attack on society’s stereotypes of aging women? Revelation, naturally — but genesis, too.
Original works by the eight Vancouver-area artists were unveiled last Friday during an opening reception at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre — each one an interpretation or meditation on their act of indomitable vulnerability three years ago. (The participants have reunited each summer since for a fully-clothed picnic.)
The exhibition, titled 8 Women Aging Boldly was the brainchild of artist Annette Nieukerk. Her collage contributions (titled I have felt nothing like the wild wonder of that moment) depict female figures striding confidently toward the viewer, surrounded by mixed-media fragments that resolve into abstraction evoking medieval illumination.
Nieukerk became intrigued by the way that her mother, even in her mid-nineties, achieved a kind of dermal luminescence. “Her skin seemed to get very translucent, and she seemed to glow almost from the inside,” Nieukerk recalled. “As she aged, I became very interested in working with aging bodies, not just for their beauty, but wanting to accept it and accept what was happening with my own body.”
Nieukerk wondered if there were other women prepared to reflect on living vibrantly while grappling with physical transformation. She sent dozens of emails. She received dozens of rejections. Watercolourist Tannis Hopkins was one of them. “But then I realized if I didn’t do it, I would regret it,” Hopkins realized. Her tawny canvases — like Fading beauty — reveal women’s bodies in moments of insouciant intimacy: clad only in pink slippers at a vanity mirror, or quaffing at a bar yet invisible to male tipplers.
Some contributors portray the bodies themselves that were on display during the fateful day in June. In her Shameless Anatomy diptych, Lorna Schwenk uses pastels to echo postures captured on the beach: arms outstretched, exultant, surrounded by handwritten free verse. “This old body / is curiously supple / full of surprise,” she writes. “Its secret need is to / dance across a stage in full view.” (Schwenk reignited her passion for burlesque dance in her mid-70s.)
Others, like the prints of Carol Roberts, sublimate physical figures into conflagrations of colour in which female faces exude solemn joy. Nicky Evans reshaped the images by photographer Vince Hemingson into two- and three-dimensional mosaics. Works by Rosemary Burden (like her Sand and Sea series) depict bucolic landscapes on accordion-shaped and stacked-block substrates, accompanied by poetry: “In the light before grey / pink rises / violet otting / reflects in water / round my feet / a moment.”
In contrast, Joyce Ozier uses mixed media canvases to highlight the unapologetic candour of icons like sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer and writer Maya Angelou. Yvonne Adalian, whose poem On the Beach encapsulates the experience of senior sisterhood (“Careless of the ravages of gravity / sponging up the sun”) also developed the metaphor of being constrained by convention: her ecstatic two-dimensional nudes are cloistered in vintage wine boxes. A half-hour video documentary by Mary Ungerleider (at 82 years of age, still zip-lining in Whistler) captures the voices of the eight artists.
The exhibition debuted last year at the Parker Street Gallery in Vancouver; its residency in Sechelt — fittingly, in a venue regularly used for life drawing classes — is its second appearance. “The whole point was to get out there to celebrate ourselves, to celebrate our bodies, and to be creative,” added Nieukerk.
8 Women Aging Boldly remains on display at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre until June 21.
