Five women, five artists,
a Song from the Heart
Cape Breton female artists unveil their latest work at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts
From the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Saturday, August 11, 2007
By DEIRDRE MACDONALD
PLEASANT BAY artist Ann Hart wanted to celebrate her upcoming 65th birthday with other women artists who’ve chosen Cape Breton as their home.
Hart Songs, an exhibit of five women artists, is that celebration.
On Sunday, Sumi-e painter and watercolourist Hart will join fellow artists mixed-media painter Taiya Barss, potter Deanie Cox, tapestry hooker Claudia Gahlinger and photographer Carol Kennedy as the exhibition officially opens at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts. It runs until mid-September.
Travlling to Inverness, you’ll experience some of the Cape Breton these women love and that’s inspired Hart Songs.
Returning to Pleasant Bay from Halifax, where she’d been housesitting for Barss, Hart reflected on the inspiration she’d drawn from the Cape Breton artists’ community since her arrival in the early 1970s and came up with an idea for this show.
The five women, whose lives have intertwined for more than 20 years, some longer, share a deep love for Cape Breton.
""It has become an inner centre for all of us as well as a physical centre,"" Hart says.
Reflecting on the group, Barss, who divides her time between Cape Breton and Halifax, says, "Ann is our common friend. She’s the one who connected our dots and brought us together for this show."
Hart arrived in Pleasant Bay in the midst of a snowstorm. It was June 1972.
Raised in Missouri, she was seeking a place with a worldier outlook to raise her daughters.
Despite the swirling snow on that June day, standing in the abandoned house friends had found her, Hart knew she’d come to her spiritual home.
Months before, she’d dreamed of a house on a cliff, surrounded by pine trees.
As Hart stared out from a second-floor attic window in the room that’s her studio today, she marvelled at the view. This wasn’t the house in her dream, but it was to become her home, its setting an inspiration for her paintings.
In her work, as in her life, Hart has sought to balance her western upbringing with eastern sensibilities.
Her first husband was Chinese, and travel-ling with him, she discovered the beauty of oriental painting for the first time and felt immediate empathy with its images and style.
"In oriental thought, everything has its own beingness,"" Hart says. ""The paper, the brush, the water are all elements in the process of creation. The artist is just one small leaf on the tree.""
Hart’s body of work includes traditional Chinese brush paintings, as well as western-style watercolours.
Like Hart, tapestry hooker Claudia Gahlinger, also a writer and horticulturalist, was drawn to Cape Breton.
"I’ve always been like a homing pigeon trying to get to this place, "" says Gahlinger, who was raised in Ontario. ""I can’t imagine living anywhere else."
With partner Réjean Chamberland, she lives and works in the Northeast Highlands, at South Harbour Farm, a magical place, which shimmers in mid-summer with the brilliant colours of flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetables.
Gahlinger’s delicately shaded tapestries, hooked on linen and burlap in hand-dyed wool, are inspired by the land, sea, and cloudscapes of the Highlands.
Clouds drift across the sky in Gahlinger’s tapestries, the sea sucks and roars, the wind swirls across sand and over rocks.
Photographer Carol Kennedy is well known for her classic hand-printed portraits, as well as for her figure studies and landscapes.
Kennedy, who shares a studio with her husband, metal sculptor Gordon Kennedy Ironart & Photographs is enthusiastic about how digital photography has transformed the practice of her art.
In a world where everyone wields a camera, she questions: "Why make another postcard when I can delve into a surreal, dreamlike world with photoshop?"
Her newest photographs, such as The Shaman’s Door, feature wondrous trees, an homage to what she believes is our noblest species.
"Besides, nudes can argue with me, trees can’t, " she quips with characteristic wit.
Kennedy sees many similarities between her work as a photographer and Taiya Barss’s work as a painter.
They’re both romantics, fascinated by our place in nature, who often create dreamlike visions in their work.
Barss, as does Kennedy in many of her photographs, layers images in her vibrantly coloured paintings that suggest metamorphosis, journeys through time, the cycle of birth, growth, decay, and regeneration.
Barss’s triptych, Alpha to Omega, painted in luminescent whites, glowing golds, and vibrant greens, portrays three eggs in a nest, a close-up of one delicate yet powerful wing and the bleached skulls of two birds.
Behind the skulls, the golden background parts and opens out into a shimmering white light.
Despite the presence of suffering in her work, the inevitability of death, Barss’s canvases always move towards the light.
Look for Barss’s newest paintings in this show, some of which have been incubating for years.
Potter and mask maker Deanie Cox, also a musician and her husband, luthier Otis Tomas entertained at the marriage of Taiya Barss and Tom Sawyer in 2005.
Today, she and Tomas live just down the road from Carol and Gordon Kennedy in North River.
When their children were young, Cox, Hart, and Kennedy founded a Waldorf School at St. Ann’s with other local families.
Cox first met Gahlinger years ago when they were tree planting together. Over the years, Cox’s life has intertwined most closely with the lives of the others.
Cox apprenticed for four years with Carole MacDonald of Goose Cove Pottery.
"I had no idea until I started doing it (working with clay) that I would take to it," she laughs and observes in her down-to-earth manner.
Cox first learned to sculpt and then developed her wheel-throwing skills, creating her own glazes such as Dean’s Keen Green, which she uses on her stoneware and learned the art of raku.
Since June 1997, Cox has been a self-employed artist, working from Shape Shift Pottery, her studio and shop in the North River Schoolhouse.
She’s best known for her Animal Spirit Masks, her Body Pots and her Turtle Boxes.
Cox’s glorious raku masks her bears, eagles, foxes, seals, and turtles encourage viewers to marvel at the animal world.
"In Cape Breton, I’ve been able to live the seasons,"" Hart reflects, while standing in her cliff-top garden in Pleasant Bay. with the ocean surging below. ""Here, it’s me and the elements the air, land and water. Cape Breton has opened my eyes to see light, patterns, movement, to see in a different way, always with respect for other forms of existence.
Miraculously, the five of us landed here and we all totally appreciate where we are."
Some women, some artists, some Cape Breton songs!
Deirdre Macdonald is a freelance writer living in beautiful Aspy Bay, Cape Breton.
