From the Ground Up: Artists in Practice for 50 Years

Artspace is proud to announce the final exhibition of our 50th anniversary year.

From the Ground Up: Artists in Practice for 50 Years features sculptural, painted, and textile works by Dorothy Caldwell, Wayne Cardinalli, Frances Dorsey, Faye Jacobs, Jeanne McRight, and Brian Nichols. Connected by time, theme, and place, their works illuminate the underlayers that ground and support 5 decades of artistic practice.

Curators’ Talk and Tea: Sun, Oct 6, 2pm

Closing Reception: Sat, Nov 16, 2-4 pm

Artists’ Statements

Dorothy Caldwell

My work investigates how people mark the land and how we come to know "place" through personal landmarks and conventional mapping. After working in the unfamiliar territory of remote landscapes, recent work revisits the personal landscape of rural Ontario. Through walking, gathering, touching, and recording, small works reflect the intimate experience of "place".  These explorations provide a basis for the large-scale works, extending the intimate to include the larger landforms.

The vocabulary is drawn from textile traditions that speak to the “everyday": stitching, darning, mending, and patching. I have a deep respect for the way cloth behaves. Cloth is fragile. It breaks down, wears out, and is then repaired and reconstructed. These sensibilities resonate with me: Cloth is powerful when it retains traces of its previous life, gathers history, and becomes something new. The stitch is a mark and the graphic quality of these marks is incorporated into the work together with the practice of reconstruction.  I approach my cloth as something that needs to be repaired. Like the marks on the landscape, these processes encode a sense of time and history.

Wayne Cardinalli

Much of my work originates on the potter’s wheel and is staunchly functional. At times I depart from this to create pieces of sculptural intent. These pieces are often handbuilt or contain handbuilt elements. However there is not a clear separation between the two, rather, there is always an element of each in both. Regardless of the functional or sculptural intent of the work, the elements that remain constant are an exploration of direct gestural distortions of the freshly firmed clay and a subtle painterly approach to the glaze.

I’ve been making pots, full-time since I graduated from Tyler School Of Art in 1970. Since then I’ve taught ceramics part-time. Taking a little time away from my studio keeps my ideas fresh.

Frances Dorsey

Working with cloth is slow and allows time for reflection. The act of weaving allows me to build an image, pattern, or colour interaction directly into the structure; the idea is intrinsic to the material itself. The slowly accumulating weaving gestures that assemble something out of a pile of string on the floor have a weirdly sensuous aspect that is both seductive and horrifying. Subsequently dyeing and printing the yarn or cloth and then sewing it together permits a different kind of intervention on an already existing material, changing forms, colours, patterns or graphic marks without altering the physical nature of the cloth. Reconciling these divergent impulses, some slow and controlled and others recklessly fast and unpredictable, is fascinating and often very surprising.

This work process has become a metaphor for me for exploring geological and evolutionary actions over time. I live where dark igneous rocks meet light granite bedrock, laid down more than 400 milllion years ago, among granitic whalebacks sprinkled with glacial erratics from the most recent glaciation 12,000 years ago. The terrain is harsh but filled with tiny plant, animal and mineral gems. It reflects toughness and endurance along with the vulnerable, layered, multiple lives and functions around us all and beneath our feet. Though complex to grasp, attempts to observe and understand such phenomena can give rise to an imaginary world of shapes, forms and colours, and narratives that can inspire while remaining ambiguous and elusive.

Faye Jacobs

My artwork is a search for the root of human existence.

In 2006, I found over thirty pairs of kid leather gloves my mother wore throughout her long life. I remembered each pair and when she wore it. I put them away for a future project. This work is my response to saving the gloves in order to use them as symbols of life.

We wear gloves to protect our hands in work. They are also elegant accessories, warm protectors, and housings for our hands. People like my mother considered gloves part of their identity, wearing them to go out in the world. In this work, the gloves represent her presence in my life and my redefining them to make art. While the gloves fit my hands, at the same time they project my independent energy as a maker.

Weaving, knitting, braiding, stitching and laminating are textile techniques used to integrate these gloves into a sculptural work. Copper wire is a conductor joining ideas together. Each of the three parts represents a different perspective of how hands and gloves are a source of being human.

Faye Jacobs is a Canadian weaver, sculptural textile artist and teacher with over fifty years of experience. Faye began her career custom knitting while she was an Olympic skier, furthering her design talents manufacturing professional skiwear and boots. She moved to the United States in 1969 where she studied and practiced Fiberarts in Boulder Colorado and Berkeley California.

Faye returned to Canada in 1999, settling first in Peterborough and now in Lakefield. She was the lead hand in restoring the Jacquard Loom at Lang Pioneer Village Museum. For this work she received a 2017 Volunteer Service Award for Ontario 150. Faye is a sought-after workshop leader in Papermaking, Natural Dyes, and specialized Weaving techniques. She exhibits and sells her work at textile art fairs and exhibitions. Faye invites you to see new work in her outdoor studio space at the Kawartha Autumn Studio Tour 2024.

Jeanne McRight

My work as an artist and environmentalist is focused on exploring the permeability of hierarchical layers. Early examples are my 1980s installations at Artspace Ad Infinitum/Circle of Fire (Artspace AANPAC/ROCA Conference, Trent University, June 1987), and Homo Ultimatus Trail (The Artspace Exchange Exhibition. St. John's, Nfld: Art Gallery of Memorial University, 1986).

From 1990 to 2011, I taught visual art and photography at Toronto’s Etobicoke School of the Arts. During that time, I began a series of paintings and photographs that depicted trophic levels within ecosystems. These artworks illustrate the complex and beautiful regenerative cycle of producers, consumers, and decomposers, showing the interconnected and overlapping pathways that energy and nutrients follow through the ecosystem.

My painting Cathedral Grove, 2009, depicts a burned section of a Western Douglas fir and the silhouette of a western red cedar in an old-growth forest on Vancouver Island. These ancient and resilient organisms function as nurse trees that support biodiverse ecological communities, connecting the earth to the air from root to canopy

Over the past 12 years, I’ve become committed to environmental advocacy and action. Currently, all of my efforts are directed toward my role as the founder and board chair of Blooming Boulevards. Our primary focus lies in cultivating native plants and collaborating with volunteers to establish habitat networks that bolster pollinating insects and promote ecological well-being throughout the municipality of Mississauga.

My work has taken many forms over 50 years, but it has always been grounded in a continuum of hope.

Brian Nichols

The work presented in this exhibition has been created over the past ten years, as I return annually to a favourite cabin on Change Islands, Newfoundland. Using pieces of wood from broken lobster traps found as I wander the North Atlantic Ocean trails I construct geometric shapes that are then painted and hung to move freely. Here, they have been re-configured as mobiles, influenced by the groundbreaking work of Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976). Found materials have been integrated, with the wooden structures, into the mobiles.

Now at age 72, I have been privileged to have had a parallel life in the arts alongside an academic career that included 25 years of full-time teaching and another 30-plus years as a psychotherapist. I have a doctorate in Applied Psychology from the University of Toronto (1995) which examined the inner world of children as seen through their art. I have always maintained a studio space and in 1995 this studio became integrated into a therapy practice. Since 2003 I have gone to Zimbabwe ten times to volunteer doing AIDS work in a rural hospital. This experience, along with 13 month-long visits on Change Islands (Newfoundland), has had a huge impact on my art-making.

Expression through visual art, dance, and theatre has allowed me to successfully work in the area of trauma and to integrate these experiences into my life in a more meaningful way.

Curators’ Statements

Jillian Ackert

What sustains 50 years of creative practice? As an emerging and disabled artist in my first decade of presenting work, I often wonder about what sustains–or inhibits– a lifelong creative practice. The artists presented here have answered this question through the knowledge and stories shared in their pieces, along with that shared in their studios and gardens, over tea, and across distance. The answers lie woven, sculpted, and embedded in all the nooks, grooves, strokes, and marks, and in the ground beneath our feet.

Connections between and across the works are truly abundant, revealed through their materiality, processes, and thematic underpinnings. While our white, settler, and colonial culture often values independence and productivity as measures of success, the underlayers here are ones of support, connection, and interdependence– with one another, humans and non-humans, and the ground from which we grow. In these artworks, there is also a deep reverence for that which nourishes body and spirit, inviting viewers to get curious about what might nourish their own.

The curatorial work for "From the Ground Up" was deeply influenced by our commitment to listening, collaboration, and presence, both with the artists and with each other as co-curators. Despite the wealth of work on display, each piece is given ample space, within an arrangement that honors the stories and knowledge embedded in each work, and allows conversation to flow between them. It is our intention that From the Ground Up offer a calm and warm place to linger; to contemplate questions of what sustenance, sustainability, and care are needed in our creative and artistic practices; to wonder at what a lifelong practice can look like; and to imagine what the gift of a lifelong practice could bring.

Peg Town

With this project, we are seeking to honour the 50 years of Artspace in our community. What better way to do so than to fill the gallery with works by six accomplished visual artists, all with connections to this artist-run centre? Dorothy Caldwell, Wayne Cardinalli, Frances Dorsey, and Jeanne McRight were involved with Artspace when it opened in the 1970s. Brian Nichols has been actively involved with Artspace since the 1990s and Faye Jacobs has more recent ties to the centre. All of these artists have been making art and making art happen for (at least) 50 years, both in Peterborough and beyond, and they continue to do so with as much passion and rigor as they did when their practices began.

Visual art invites viewers to look at other perspectives of the world in which we live. Each of these 6 artists’ processes is very much grounded in “place”, and deeply informed by their environment.

The process of curating this exhibition has entailed ongoing conversations about how the artworks “speak” to each other, and "how the work is grounded" became the unifying language for this exhibition. Frances Dorsey’s textile panels are her study of the glacial erratics - traces of a time before human existence - in her own backyard in Halifax. Jeanne McRight’s painting is a record of the deep-rooted resilience she witnessed in the ecosystem of a West Coast forest. Dorothy Caldwell’s textiles map the marks she sees in the rural landscape of her home near Hastings. Brian Nichols’ sculpture transforms old lobster traps and fish net weights that he found on the Change Islands and draws one's view from the ground up. Wayne Cardinalli’s robust vases and teapots are reconstituted earth, bantering with one another. Meanwhile, Faye Jacobs’ works speak individually while weaving a unifying narrative about her origins and metamorphosis.

Each artwork shows us the evidence of the artists' skilled hands at work. Years of practice give shape to these materials, displaying a balance of precision and whimsy. Together, the artworks are in dialogue with one another, inviting viewers to join the conversation.