Hart Songs

Inverness County Centre for the Arts

August 12 through September 10, 2007
Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada

Five Cape Breton based women artists

Ann Hart: oriental brush painting, watercolor, oil, pencil drawings

Carol Kennedy: photography

Claudia Gahlinger: tapestries hooked in yarn, botanical drawings

Deanie Cox: raku masks and 'body pots'

Taiya Barss: mixed media painting

• The original idea for Hart Songs was to mount a 35 year retrospective of my work and to host a celebration of my sixty-fifth year. The plan expanded when I realized that I do not think of myself as a lone painter; I am invigorated by other artists and especially these four. We are longtime friends who have traveled the world and returned always to our island home to care for our families and land, to work, grow, learn, and to create.
  
• Our art creations are as varied as we are, yet harmonious. Carol's photographs are visionary landscapes and classic portraits, technical and complex. Whether she works in acrylic, oil, or mixed media, Taiya's paintings are deep and layered, in both the literal and figurative sense. Deanie does simple pots, coupling the humor and pain of experience and lifelike totem masks in the ancient Raku firing tradition. Claudia records the world around her in intricate wool tapestries. I paint the earth, ancient yet ever new. Several of us draw faces and nature with the simplest of tools: pencil on paper. We are other things too. Writers, musicians, gardeners, mothers, partners, teachers, health caregivers.
  
• Complicated and simple, black and white next to high color, soft/hard, fast/slow, wet/dry; these opposites compose a song of 35 years of growth and expression. We wish to share our visions with Cape Breton and her visitors, move the show to larger venues, encourage viewers to see their world, to celebrate this Life, to find an Art and to create.
  
• I have asked my most admired friends to help me do just this, to reflect on our own lives as artists and to bring in the milestone of seniority with a celebration.

• http://invernessarts.ca