Drawn From Wood runs from May 5, 2022 to July 2, 2022, at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba.
Pictured Above: He Used to Whittle, Brad Copping, 2022.
“The works of Brad Copping indicate an understanding of liquid states unique to a glass-worker. Through the frozen bubbles of Evaporate and the weighty ensō circle of Ripple, Copping draws attention to forms that are more about volume than mass–more about content than container. In the partnered works Transform and Weep, the form’s membrane is unhappily ruptured, the sacrifice of sap made palpable from a human-maple hybrid caught in the midst of its transformation, its blood turned to tears. Its very shadow is made of wine bottles warped into buckets, waiting to receive. With the tonal rhythm of Drip echoing through the gallery, these works speak between themselves, about having been liquid, having been solid; about containing, and about being contained.”
- Excerpt from 'Changing States' by Lucie Lederhendler.
Evaporate, Brad Copping, 2022.
Mary Anne Barkhouse, 2022
“A hummingbird showed up at Mary Anne Barkhouse’s home in early spring, well before any flowers were blooming, and sent her to her bird books to figure out what it was doing there. It turns out that hummingbirds often live off sap early in the season, sourcing out trees that have been pre-drilled by woodpeckers and other birds so they can avail themselves of the sap that is starting to run. Her piece for the exhibition is a sculptural installation in textile and ceramic that focuses on the intricacies of the relationship between migratory and resident species with maple hardwood forests.”
- Excerpt from the curatorial statement by Heather Smith.
Drawn From Wood features the work of Mary Anne Barkhouse, Gary Blundell, Brad Copping, and Victoria Ward, and was curated by Heather Smith.
All four mid-career artists in this exhibition live in the boreal forest of Ontario, and have responded to the idea of maple syrup making in ways that are not unlike the “boiling down” process.They seem to have evaporated off all superficial nationalistic content and we are left with some surprising yet ‘sweet’ perspectives.
“‘Boiling down the pan’ is at the root of syrup making. It is also the reductive process, akin to evaporation, that these artists use to illuminate what is so evocative about the maple tree and syrup making. Making maple syrup is slow–it takes hours and hours to boil away 40 gallons of sap to be left with one gallon of Syrup. And in that time conversations bloom and ideas–like the idea of inviting artists to respond to the maple syrup making process–are born.
- Excerpt from the curatorial statement by Heather Smith
