Recently, a painting depicting a tense moment in history left the Coast bound for a Simon Fraser University gallery. It captures the pepper spraying of students in 1997 who were gathered at the University of British Columbia to protest the lack of human rights on the agenda of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) conference. In the painting, the protesters are in agony, hands covering their stinging eyes and faces turned away from threatening, shadowy background figures brandishing raised sticks.
The artist, Heather Passmore of Roberts Creek, was there during the entire ugly incident. Ten years later, she painted it. The artwork, currently entitled Student Bodies and the APEC Affair has been purchased by Simon Fraser University.
Simon Fraser gallery curator Bill Jeffries said he was intrigued by the painting and its particular translation from photo media images. Most of the art purchased by the left-leaning university relates to students and their history, he explained.
The medium for the mural painting is unusual: using the media images that flooded TV and magazines, Passmore collaged them, cut stencils, then spray painted oil paint onto a three-metre long piece of plywood using homemade aerosols. Each coat had to be applied a bit at a time, until the nozzle clogged. One coat would take eight hours. It was painstaking and the result is almost a sepia tone, a blend of browns, giving the overall painting an archival feel. Why spray paint? Murals are often used to counteract graffiti, and they are spray painted, she says.
When the work was finished, another student took a photo of Passmore crouched in front of it, hands across her face, looking like another anguished student in the crowd. It epitomized her feeling. "I was so tired. That painting took lots of work," she recalls.
Passmore, an MFA graduate of University of British Columbia, is not one to shy away from strong visuals. One of her pieces, completed at age 17 while she was still a student at Elphinstone, depicts slim fingers snatching and snarling the hair of a Medusa-like head. In one of the bony hands lies a dead bird. An incident in which she caught her hair in a blackberry bush on an overgrown trail triggered the painting, but Passmore realizes that the deeper impetus for her work came out of a situation of abuse.
"Sometimes, it is a bit difficult to make general statements about these things," she says, "because even with my most conceptual works, I start making things intuitively, and then only afterwards, I can see what I was looking for, or coping with, or wanting to express." Most of the time she makes art by trying to make her work relevant to the viewer - something they can understand or become intrigued by, since she finds that looking at emotionally charged artwork sometimes helps her.
Though the piece was intended to hang at her school, it now hangs at a private home. She's not sure whether the reason relates to its strong content. Her art makes her no stranger to controversy. She designed a cover illustration for an anthology of B.C. writers in 2002 called All Wound Up by Ripple Effect Press (now Lions Gate Publishing). The somewhat stylized nude female figure on the cover had been bound by string giving her flesh a puffy look. The book's editor David Samin recalls he had placed the book's title across the figure's chest to hide any potential nudity. Nonetheless, the book cover was deemed offensive by the newsgroup that supplies B.C. Ferries with titles for their bookstores and it was withdrawn from circulation. Even if her art is edgy, it must be aesthetically engaging, Passmore says. She has recently shown a series of her photographic studies entitled Mis-Takes at the Burnaby Public Library. The accidentally exposed photos are all marred in some way (or made more interesting depending on how you view them), and they relate to mistakes in her life. Currently, she is preparing a series of drawings for a show in Finland, where she was a visual arts instructor at the Orivesi Art College in 2007.
