By Mike Landry
Marshall's handwoven, hand-dyed, wool and silk "Use of Chemicals in Commercial Farming, PEI, NS, NB, NL 1996-2006."
A couple years ago, Rilla Marshall was at a crossroads. She could follow fatter pockets outside Atlantic Canada, or stay home and try to establish a career. Living in Cornerbrook at the time, the now Halifax-based textile artist started thinking about why people stay and leave the region, which led her to her exhibition Home Terrain.
For Marshall, it came down to quality of life. She decided to stay and started looking into what exactly this “quality of life” was drawing people here and keeping her rooted. Converting Statistic Canada numbers into first hand-drawn graphs and then weaving those graph shapes, Marshall created shapes easily mistakable for local landscapes.
“Landscapes are very subjective, evocative and nostalgic,” says Marshall. “But the information behind these landscapes was something that was supposed to very objective and empirical, but these statistics are based on people’s lives that actually live here.”
Some of the pieces in Home Terrain are taken directly from Statistics Canada. A juxtaposition of PEI cancer rates and the use of agricultural chemicals used on the island looks like farming fields. Asthma rates in the Atlantic Provinces end up as rolling hills.
Other “landscapes” are like weaved doodles—shapes that Marshall have always been interested in and fit naturally with graphs and charts. All the original graphs will be presented alongside the weaved versions.
Marshall has been incorporating non-traditional art inspiration in her weaving since she was a student. Graphs, heartbeats, aerial photographs, things deciphered by technology as data.
“Weaving is such an interesting way to explore ideas about objective facts because weaving is information itself. Weaving is where the computer came from (at least the binary code)… Anything graphed can be woven, but there’s something very comforting about textiles.”
The centrepiece for the exhibition is a large blanket with 12 “graphs” arranged in a grid like a textile sampler. The blanket’s graphs are the result of a “quality of life” questionnaire Marshall created and had answered by 12 friends in various Atlantic areas.
It was her doubt in the actual objectivity of the Statistic Canada information that led her to create her own survey. The survey included questions like: Do you have a veggie garden? How close do you live to the ocean? Do you bike or drive more to get around?
“There’s definitely a filtration process that happens. So I thought if it’s questionable how objective some of this is, I may as well go in the other direction and create a questionnaire that’s totally subjective.”
Of course Marshall’s stats aren’t the stuff of Tourism departments. But by both creating her own stats and interpreting others into her work she’s channeled the sense of community that kept her anchored.
“My reasons for staying here aren’t necessarily because it’s an idyllic pastoral utopia. I’m pretty aware of a lot of the problems that exist here, whether it’s environmental, social conservatism, or that small town mentality…it was thinking about community and my own subjective ideas of what makes up the good life.”
November 27th, 2009 at
I was talking with Rilla at the One of a Kind Show in Toronto on Thursday and she told you had posted this review. As a weaver myself and a writer / publisher with a focus on Canadian Textile and Fibre based Arts Crafts and history I am always glad when other publications review Textile work. I saw Rilla’s work in the group exhibition Common Thread at The Illingworth Kerr Gallery at ACAD University in Calgary, and subsequently published a profile of her in Volume 5 Issue 2 of fibreQUARTERLY focusing on her production weaving (scarves) Its great to see her first solo exhibition get the attention it deserves.
it is also great to find another Canadian Art Review publication, I will assume you all know about Shotgun-Review.ca and their coverage of exhibitions in Western Canada