Beneath the Surface, Part 3: Tawny Maclachlan Capon

My partner in the show was Tawny Maclachlan Capon. She is an amazing, accomplished artist who happens to live on Gabriola. I had booked the space for the show in August, but realized I probably didn't have time to finish enough new work by November. So I thought about artists that might be willing to show with me, and Tawny was the first one I asked. To my delight, she said "Yes!"

Here is her artist statement:

I am continuing my journey and building on my artmaking series inspired by Whales, Wool, Wire, and Washi, Toronto show at the David Kaye Gallery in 2018. The works are all a mix of felt, furnace filters, roving, yarn, brads, wire, washi, assorted papers, and fabric all layered, stretched, and sewn onto canvas.

They are emotional abstractions inspired by the energy of the sea and our Southern Resident Killer Whale population.

Something we as humans have in common with orcas are GRANDMOTHERS. Post reproductively aged female resident killer whales lead the collective movements of their families. Only three species on earth including humans and killer whales go through menopause. The female orca will not then be in competition with their daughters, leaving them in the position of matriarch and leader. With the ecological knowledge acquired over many years, the wisdom of the elder can now drive the survival of the pods. A matrilineal system like humans and orcas, may be the answer to our survival. Beneath the Surface, and below the filters, the orcas sing, dance, share, and play. Creating patterns with their energy and giving us the gift of their presence.

On Nov. 2nd, 2020 while I was writing this orcas swam by!!

Tawny's studio is indeed a dream space. Visit her website! Here's a little more if you care to read on. 

Beneath the Surface - by Alexander Varty

It’s a damp October day, and the view from Tawny Maclachlan Capon’s studio is, well, muted. The Salish Sea and the Sunshine Coast have elided into a single shade of pearly grey and, in the foreground, cedar and salal mingle their various shades of subdued green. Inside, though, the colours are vibrant on ladderlike sculptures that reach towards the vaulted ceiling, in a lively sketch that this interdisciplinary artist drew as a child, and in an assortment of beautifully assured figure studies. Somewhat quieter are the textile works that Capon plans to exhibit at the Gabriola Arts & Heritage Centre this weekend, as part of Beneath the Surface, a joint show with fellow artist Heather Cameron. 

But on close inspection these, too, shimmer with flashes of blue and black and silver: finlike shapes rise out of wavy folds of material; schools of curving lines evoke the riches of the sea; and words pertaining to singing, dancing orcas are veiled under a fog-pale mist.

Capon’s contributions to Beneath the Surface are decidedly marine, and definitely inspired by the “Serengeti-like” natural wonders she sees from her oceanview windows. They’re also quite different from the painstakingly stitched “samplers” in Cameron’s Material Thoughts series, in which provocative quotes from some very profound minds have been layered, in a balloon-like font, onto upcycled vintage tweeds. But there are also marked links in the way that these artists play with perspective and perception, reinvent materials, and see the world.

“The pieces I did in Material Thoughts, they came from a dream,” Cameron explains. “And there were words in my dream, but I couldn’t quite make them out and I thought ‘Well, what would that be like to experience in our waking state?’ So I’m using a font that’s so distorted it’s almost unreadable, but it’s amazing the way that our active mind conjures meaning. It wants to create order; it wants to make sense. So there’s that interplay going on between the unconscious and the conscious.”

“For myself, I would say it’s more of a meditative state than the dream state,” Capon notes, while allowing that she, too, is exploring a kind of liminal space—the undersea world of whales as seen from our human, shore-bound eyes. Meditation, she says, “takes me to a sense of focused rest, and that gives me energy.”

The two creators are showing together out of Cameron’s intuition that as senior artists working with text and textiles, they’d be a good fit—an assessment with which Capon agrees. “I think that it’s sort of meant to be,” she says happily. “I feel really good about it, and I really hope that it will delight and inspire the people who come to see it, and maybe help expand their perception of what textiles can be.

“We can look at work on the computer, but it’s not the same as being there,” she adds. “So we feel fortunate that we can do this. Wear a mask, keep it to six people in the hall at a time, and talk to the artists… I hope it will be a really good weekend.”

-- by Alexander Varty