An Unexpected Discovery - by Regina Marzlin

 Two weeks ago, I spent a few days in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It is the capital of our neighbouring province and I was there for the first time. Fredericton is not a large city, the population is about 63000, but being the capital of the province, there was a lot to see and do. One of the stops on my list was the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the provincial art gallery that houses important Canadian and British collections in a modern building that was expanded in 2017.

To my delight, I discovered an exhibition by Canadian sculptor and textile artist Sarah Maloney (b. 1965) called "Sarah Maloney's Pleasure Ground: A Feminist Take on the Natural World". I had seen some of her pieces before at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. This exhibition was a deep-dive into several bodies of work developed between 1993 and 2021.

 Her representations of the human body and of botanicals reference gender, pleasure, desire and power. From the wall plaque: "Meticulous, witty and historically researched, Maloney interprets mythology and symbolism in labour-intensive techniques, from welding to stitching. Her work challenges how people think about icons of Western colonialism, such as museum collections, domestic gardens, and landscape art."

The "Collect-Arrange" (No. 1,2,3) pieces depict vases from the British Museum filled with cut flowers modelled after historical botanical illustrations. It prompts questions about collecting - what is collected by public museums and by whom? It was hard to believe that those vases are embroidered!

Three life-sized stitched panels titled "Skeletal System, Circulatory System, Major Organs" depict just that. The sheer size is impressive, as is the detailed stitching.

More art dealing with body imagery (unfortunately I didn't get all the individual titles):

I really appreciated her combination of embroidery, knitting and painting with 3D objects and her sculptural approach. A very well done exhibition that I stumbled on unexpectedly. It is always satisfying to see textile art on par with all the other media in a museum setting.

A Visit behind the Scenes - by Regina Marzlin

 

I was in Boston for our annual Art Cloth Network meeting a week ago. We held our meeting in this location to be able to take full advantage of the Boston Fiber Arts Symposium “Gather”, a month-long exploration of fiber art in the greater Boston area.

One of the events on offer was a behind-the-scenes tour at the Peabody Essex Museum storage facility in Rowley, Massachusetts. A group of about 20 interested attendees were welcomed by the museum staff and treated to a tour of the facility. It was refitted in 2017 from a toy storage facility to a state-of-the-art storage, research and preservation facility for the Peabody Essex Museum Collection.

We were able to go into the large storage room that houses the costume and textile collection. The pieces are stored hanging or lying flat in watertight, climate-controlled closets and many of them were opened for our viewing pleasure.

The historic garments are treated with care as a lot of them are fragile. The closets with newer collections included many designer names. The storage also houses a large portion of the late New York fashion icon Iris Apfel’s collection. It was so interesting to hear details about the history of some garments, to see the embroidery, the different fabrics and the innovative ideas of modern designers.

We also were allowed into the conservation lab where textile pieces were repaired and conserved. The conservationist was working on a Hawaiian bark cloth garment and other bark cloth items. She told us a bit about the history and making of this particular plant fiber and the resulting cloth.

Lastly, we were invited into the Phillips Library that houses several hundred thousand books and over a linear mile of archival materials The head librarian showed us some of the textile related books in this collection. Some were sample books that traveling merchants would show to their clientele.

The tour was a visual feast and very inspiring. As most of the collection of the Peabody Museum is in storage and not on display at the actual Museum, it was great to be able to peek behind the scenes.