Toronto Craft Alert

by Tara Bursey

antipersonnel, knitted yarns, detail landscape.

Barb Hunt is a Newfoundland-based artist and educator, whose work I was lucky enough to be introduced to by a beloved teacher in art school a few years ago. Her political and often poignant work employs craft processes to explore rituals of mourning and address the devastation of war.

You refer to your work as influenced by the history and customs of Newfoundland. Can you talk a bit about the role of craft in both Newfoundland’s history, and within it’s contemporary culture?

I have lived in Newfoundland for only nine years, so I’m not an authority on the history of craft here by any means, but I am passionate about both Newfoundland and craft! There is a very strong material culture here because when Newfoundland was first settled by Europeans, people had to build their own houses, furniture, and boats. They made their own clothes, and raised sheep for wool. We used to be a separate country, and there were times of poverty. As in many other places, textile work was often a way of earning money for food or health care (eg. Grenfell mats, Newfoundland Outport Nursing and Industrial Association knitting.) There is a strong aboriginal presence here, and I think this also has contributed to the importance of craft. For example, I heard that the local Mi’kmaq people sold baskets to the men who work at the mill here in Corner Brook.

When I moved here, I was really impressed by the number of people who knit! My mother-in-law Geraldine Browne knits socks as easily as she makes a cup of tea, and even my nephew knitted when he was a little boy. This makes sense because this is a family of fishers, and they “knit” (mend) nets and “knit” the heads of lobster pots (the little net tunnel the lobster crawls through). My partner’s father used to make/knit his own nets! So DIY is an essential part of the history and culture of this province. Before 9/11 women who worked at the airport would knit in between plane arrivals and departures. And at Christmas the woman who was collecting for the Salvation Army at the local liquor store was knitting. We have also had a recent revival of rug-hooking which is a traditional practice here. So I am surrounded by all these textile activities and it feels very much like “home” even though I wasn’t born here.

Barb’s partner Jerry “knitting” a fishing-net. He comes from “a family of fishers, (who) ‘knit’ (mend) nets and ‘knit’ the heads of lobster pots.”

Much of your work involves interesting juxtapositions between typically feminine imagery/subjects and typically masculine materials (as in steel dresses), and vice versa (as with antipersonnel). What are your thoughts on this recurring relationship between material and subject in your work?

I think ever since I’ve been practicing as an artist I have been interested in gender. I recognize that some materials have gender associations, even though these are often based on false assumptions about “femininity” and “masculinity.” We know these terms are social constructions, but they still influence society. With steel dresses, I translated traditional “feminine” imagery into metal as a way of trying to show these “feminine” qualities (whether hard-wired or learned) as the strength of women. I am a feminist of course, and I think we are all running around pretending that everything is equal, but it isn’t. I am angry with the current government of Canada and the fact that there are so few women in politics. For many years I have been very upset about the amount of violence in the world, and as a friend once put it, I want to “feminize” the whole world! I think this is why I use pink so much in my work — to try and make this colour a strong place to be. I realize it’s problematic to write about “women,” as if this is an essential category, and that is not my intention. But to deal with these issues, I have to start somewhere, so I do work about things that feel true to me, as a person gendered “woman.”

I also want to mention that the colour pink is more than a marker of femininity. I think of it as an “incarnate” colour representing the body (seen particularly where the skin is most sensitive). The name of the colour pink actually comes from the notched edges of carnations, as they appear to be cut with pinking shears. It is the colour of blood and milk, or blood and snow (as an old veteran once pointed out to me). It can represent sacrifice — Jesus holds a carnation in some portraits as an omen. And it can also mean reincarnation — the Romans put roses on graves at Easter in hopes of this. For me, these meanings are particularly relevant to the antipersonnel work.

What percentage of your practice is spent doing research? Surely a large part of making antipersonnel, which is in the collection of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, York Wilson Endowment Award, Canada Council, was spent researching the subject of land mines.

In 1998, at the start of the antipersonnel project, I spent a lot of time doing research on land mines. Canada had just initiated the Ban Mine Treaty against these awful things that are so prevalent in the world, and yet I had never seen an image of one! They seemed like a big horrible secret, and I was astounded to find out how many different kinds there were, and the amazing levels of contemporary technology in some of them. I do less research now, but it is still a very important aspect of the work. It’s important to me to get all the details right, so that each mine looks accurate. I think this gives the work a level of seriousness (in contrast to the giddy froth of pink!). I have a good source of information in a US military CD that was anonymously sent to me from the United States. It is the same CD that soldiers use in the field to identify mines, so it has specifications, images, and information about how they are used, and how to defuse them. My partner Jerry Browne is a technical wizard, so he can translate the technical language so I can understand how they work. But the more I learn about them, the more difficult it becomes. I find this issue to be really upsetting, so I don’t spend a lot of time researching mines because it is too emotional for me. I try to keep up with what is going on, but every once in a while I see a photograph on the internet of a child or animal that has been hurt by one of these, and I can’t stand it.

The Old Lie, seams from used army fatigues, 3.5 X 8 m (2007)
Installation at Stride Gallery, Calgary
Photo credit: Hutch Hutchinson

Several of your works present powerful metaphors through the use/re-imagining of garments. One such work is he “The old lie.” Can you talk a bit about this piece?

“The old lie” is a large site-specific piece where I nail the seams of worn army uniforms on the wall in the shape of a map of the world, showing all the boundaries of the world’s countries. This work is influenced by Paul Virilio’s writing on war. I understand that he is telling us that war is everywhere. Most countries have standing armies (a fairly new invention in human history!) and our economies are founded to a great extent on war. So with this piece, I try to show war as being everywhere. I was also thinking about how boundaries are often established by war. The seams are like the “boundaries” of a body, and I see these cut up uniforms as a kind of metaphor for the body, with all the flesh blown away, and just the bones/seams left. (Cutting out fabric from between the seams of clothes is something I did when I was a poor artist living in Winnipeg. It was a way of getting cheap fabric from clothes I bought at thrift stores.)

“The old lie” is from a line in a poem very critical about World War One, Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen. “Dulce et decorum est” are the first words of a Latin saying which means “It is sweet and right to die for your country.”

Many contemporary artists are re-adopting “slow-work” processes related to craft despite living in an age entrenched in fast-moving technologies. What attracts you to labour-intensive manual processes such as knitting and embroidery?

I think my use of craft processes is itself a kind of protest. I went to art school in the 1970s when we were told to “make it big” (I always thought that was a weird thing for a male professor to say to female students!). I spent a lot of time in the sculpture studio, where we were encouraged to make work out of hard “manly” materials. I made a few small mixed-media textile pieces and my teacher made fun of them, calling them “jewellery” — which was really insulting those days. (Apologies to all the jewellers reading this.) There was a High Modernist ethos in the air, and we were supposed to make art that was not “pretty,” not “literal,” not “narrative,” along with a whole slew of insult-words that kept students working within quite narrow parameters. After graduating, I worked as an artist in Winnipeg and I think this was a really good environment for developing my art. There was a certain amount of eccentricity that was permitted in the art community. It was a small community and I don’t think we could afford to alienate anyone! I was also influenced by Sheila Butler, who was using pink in her paintings as a subversive tactic. She is a feminist and one of the founders of Manitoba’s Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA). It was great to be part of an art community of women, and I think this gave me permission to go back to “women’s work” in my art.

This return to textiles felt right to me because I had learned some of the techniques when I was a girl. My ancestors were pioneers, and my mother and grandmothers still practiced quilting and knitting, darned socks and made clothes by hand. So doing textile work connects me to them and who I am — and helps to continuously form who I am. In Newfoundland there is a great expression — “Who knit you?” I really enjoy the humbleness of textile processes, and I also am humbled by these practices. I find it magical to actually make the material of my art, and for me there is integrity in this. It gives me the time focus closely on what I am doing and to think about it deeply. The meditative accumulation of small gestures is very reassuring: it means that the small things that we do all the time might actually count for something.

For more on Barb and her work, seek out the excellent book By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art edited by Shu Hung and Joseph Magliaro, or visit Barb’s website, http://www.barbhunt.com

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