She Speaks: When sad, art

Originally published by Huntsville Doppler.

If you noticed a distinct lack of, well, me, during the federal elections, I promise it wasn’t a deliberate attempt to avoid voicing an opinion during a very opinionated time. Those are, indeed, my favourite times in which to opine. Unfortunately, my absence was due to a very unwanted diagnosis of ovarian cancer—and, yes, I’ve tried coconut oil.

A few days after the first of possibly many surgeries, I went to the Algonquin Theatre to view Kate Brown’s collection, Table of Contents. My diagnosis, among other life and world changes, has shifted my perspective and there is nothing more grounding, more universal, and more diverting than art. One of my favourite sayings comes from Cesar A. Cruz, a Mexican poet and human rights activist: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” As someone who has been labelled disturbed and is often just simply uncomfortable, I seek spaces where I can step outside the confines of my own psychological preconceptions and make space for new ideas.

I deeply, urgently recommend this. I was moved by Brown’s show and I offer the following reflection, from the child of an artist and one who, when offered a ruler with which to draw something, scribbled poetry on it instead.

One could be forgiven for presuming that Table of Contents is an attempt to depict femaleness through the symbolism of the vessel, the empty chalice, the hollow.

Well, one hopes to be forgiven—as this was my interpretation initially upon taking in Brown’s rich, varied, and deeply evocative collection. Maybe it’s the feminist in me, or the lesbian—but I do tend to instinctually interpret such art as inherently female-centred. Brown’s explanation is that this body of work is ‘gender-neutral’, with the bowls representing perhaps the stomach, or indeed the breast: elements of sustenance, of offering.

Brown’s first solo show opened in 1984, with dark, challenging pieces. When discussing her process, Brown calls herself a visualizer, and laughs when she says she’s “mostly, always surprised by the completed pieces.” She says, almost to herself: “We know things we don’t know we know.” And inspiration? There was a time when if you’d checked beneath Brown’s pillow, you’d find a copy of Emily Carr’s biography, “for strength.” Couldn’t we each use such a talisman?

The signature piece of Table of Contents is entitled “Evolution of a Painting”—the ‘finished’ painting takes pride of place beside a placard of the process it took to get there. Of the journey, Brown says, “I just kept going because I knew I needed to.” She could have chosen to complete this work at several different stages, yet the end result feels ideal, like the flourish of a quill pen inscribing The End. The collection shares the rich navy blues, creams, and oranges of “Evolution of a Painting”, with unexpected sweeps of pink, purple, or red throughout. Though cohesively curated, each canvas tells its own story.

As Brown escorts me from piece to piece, I begin to see the telltale signs of the eyedrop layering process throughout many finished products, inspired by a tear-catcher that she created herself. There’s a grid, half painstaking and half haphazard, below the surface images, sometimes existing only as texture and sometimes exposed to complement the imagery itself. When she speaks to why she chose to showcase bowls in this body of work, it’s simple: “I knew I needed an object in my abstracts.” Yet upon viewing, the observer is invited into a much more complicated internal process.

When viewing “The Apple Bowl”, Brown describes her manipulation of gravity, working in 360 degrees to achieve the desired effect. Despite the descriptive title of the painting and the fact we can observe it as a bowl, there’s still a rejection of space itself—”no up or down, no north, east, south, or west.” Brown circles back to her ethos: dispelling the notion of negative space in art. What if, she muses, we treated the environment as she treats her artwork—would we have polluted the very air we breathe if we’d truly understood that it is not empty, not nothing? Could we have dismissed it, destroyed it, knowing that air, oxygen, is tangible, like every corner of a canvas?

Then it strikes me—no bowl is ever empty. The realization changes the way I see the other pieces. Brown isn’t portraying hollow objects; they exist entirely on their own terms. Further, some only “seem like a bowl”, with Brown walking the viewer through an optical illusion where the inside of the bowl appears to transform to the outside, inviting the question, can a container refuse to contain? Be incapable of containing?

Kate Brown allows private viewings of her artwork at her home, which she considers her sacred space. After getting so much of Brown’s attention and insight during my viewing of Table of Contents, I would recommend this option to anyone who is drawn to or curious about her work. Her willingness to explore her own work through the eyes of the audience, combined with the playful reflection of her spirit in her collection, makes that sharing a rare gift.

While this show has ended, there are so many more upcoming. A particular series that is close to my heart because it uniquely combines nature and poetry is by Paula Boon, now showing at the Huntsville Public Library for the next two months. As I attempt to return to comfort, both in my own body and in the spaces I occupy, I find myself seeking art, for its simplicity, its complexity, and the innate way that, when I connect with it or the artist, I feel understood. Even when I don’t understand.