Lifeworks: Fibre optics

In August 2002, the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver hosted an exhibit of contemporary Canadian fibre art. Among the works showcased in If Images Speak a Thousand Words, two small pieces at first seemed out of place: Reduction Series #1 and Reduction Series #2 by London, Ont., artist Bev McNaughton. What were oil paintings doing amid the other fibre works? The subject matter was obviously some sort of surgical operation, but it took a few seconds for the punch line to travel from the retina to the brain. The external body and the surgeon's fingers and instruments were finely rendered in oil on silk, but where the flesh was exposed, the silk was covered in dense, gleaming embroidery. There is an oblique relationship between surgery and needlework. The word “suture” is both noun and verb in its medical sense, but it is also used in the language of film theory to describe how the film pulls viewers into the scene, making them feel as if they were present. McNaughton makes her viewers feel present by positioning them in the surgeon's place. She also commands their attention by showing a private, disturbing moment (one wants to look away) and by achieving an asthetic allure: the quality of her embroidery invites the eye to linger and the hand to venture a hesitant, surreptitious touch. Contrasting the embroidered, open wound against the discreet and bland surface of the oil paint, she deftly expresses the complexity of our physical, intellectual and emotional “insides.” McNaughton learned to embroider and knit from her mother in a typically osmotic process. She remembers spending hours as a child experimenting with coloured floss. The embroidery in Reduction Series #1 and #2 does not resemble the repetitive, formal stitchery one finds in a needlework instruction book. Rather, it is an intensely complicated layering. And it makes a feminist statement. The embroidery (traditionally seen as a frivolous, female pastime) is used to achieve a sense of realism for which oil paint (a heroic and masculine medium) is inadequate. There is an overlay of anxiety in McNaughton's work. Her father survived a malignant melanoma, and she describes how that experience irrevocably demonstrated to her that the body is vulnerable and transient. A recent graduate of the University of Saskatchewan's Master's program in Fine Arts, she has worked with microscopic imaging of her own blood cells dying and has examined her own fear of cancer in sculptural work. Much of her work is concerned with the body and its capacity for metamorphosis, both natural and imposed. She has worked with fruit as a metaphor for the body — for example, using real surgical tools to make a new species by suturing half an apple to half a pear, or presenting a banana with stitches holding its pathetic peel together. McNaughton's dark humour calls to mind a Far Side cartoon in which a chicken doctor informs his plump chicken patient that he appears to be filled with “a tasty, bread-like substance.” The effect is amusing, but menacing. McNaughton is interested in how we change our bodies through piercing, tattooing, branding and scarification to make strident statements, as well as in the transformations wrought by medical procedures such as plastic surgery. Previously, only nature and time worked changes on the body, but today many people hire surgeons to make alterations of their own designing. (A glance at a chronological series of Michael Jackson's album covers describes a transformation that in itself enters the realm of performance.) All of these processes reveal something about a person's sense of who they are and who they want to become. Without being judgemental, McNaughton's works focus our attention on the complexity of the inner self. Her embroidered version of human flesh, with its brilliant shadings and layered threads, is an apt metaphor for the stuff we are made of. Bettina Matzkuhn Ms. Matzkuhn is a fibre artist and craftsperson based in New Westminster, BC. She is currently an MA student in Liberal Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC.

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