The Sunshine Coast Art Council’s Doris Crowston Gallery in Sechelt is back from its August break with two quite different exhibitions by artists Vicky Marshall and Kitty Blandy.
Vicky Marshall is a seasoned and celebrated artist formerly based in Vancouver and for many years now, resident on the Sunshine Coast. For her exhibition, Aftermath, she has brought two sets of work, contrasting in scale and medium but with a consistent theme – the rural B.C. landscape as it’s been impacted by devastating natural events, and by humans.
That’s often a disheartening subject, but in much of this work Marshall reflects an optimism she’s found amid the charred and clear-cut backgrounds, including on her own Coast property.
“We bought a piece of land that was completely deforested,” Marshall told participants in a meet-the-artist session on Sept. 11. “We’ve been there for 12, 13 years, and for a decade I’d look out the window and just thought, ‘I’ll never paint that. I will never sketch this out. I’m not interested in it.’ And then one day, I had to realize what was going on, and how much [emergent new growth] had taken over and was coming up, and how beautiful it was.”
Those brightly coloured islands of fresh growth can be seen in all of Marshall’s large mixed-media paintings in the gallery’s main room, and in a set of smaller works in the hallway display space, in which she’s also introduced embroidered lines of fabric amidst the paint.
The gallery’s smaller area and the new Project Room space feature work by Vancouver artist Kitty Blandy in her exhibit of drawings, sculptures, and bas-relief, entitled Being.
“My work is consistently centred on the body,” Blandy told the meet-the-artist participants. “My interest has as much to do with being in the body as looking at the body. I use the nonverbal language of drawing and sculpture, which requires an empirical observation of physical experience.”
Blandy has sampled her devotion to the subject here, with many works featuring recognizable creatures and others showing experimentally and imaginatively blended forms, intended, she said, to express “a physical sympathy with our fellow creatures.”
As Blandy noted in a statement about her work, “four-limbed, vertebrate body forms … share a body structure essentially identical to our own,” which triggers “a somatic understanding within us.”
Aftermath and Being will be on at the gallery until Oct. 10.
