This has become one of my favourite things to do. Every year I go out and label the weeds and trees in the place with the highest foot-traffic on our island.
I hope people see these and begin to notice a bit of the world around them in ways they may not have, before. I hope people also go home and find the same weeds, there. Sure, it's the simplest kind of art.
I'm just chalking rocks, walls, and sidewalks with plant names! But I really feel it might be one of the most impactful works I've done.
And yes, if you're wondering, I do have municipal permission to do this! So the credit for this also goes to open-minded officials and other citizens who can appreciate the benefits of art and education in our communities. 🙂
I'm so happy that the (dis)robe: Hospital Gown piece I made last year will be on display this autumn in Vancouver, but meanwhile… I get to wear it to an art event in my hometown, tonight!! This is will be the first time I've shown it locally, and I'm REALLY nervous. This piece is all about my disability, and to say people roll their eyes when I talk disability is an understatement. But this piece features other people from our community, too, so it's time to REPRESENT!!! Here I go!
Off to the Bowen Island Community Centre. 🙂
Will update this post with a photo, later, if someone takes one.
UPDATE: It was a pretty quiet event, but nice to meet some other artists and visit with friends. I think only one person scanned the QR but that's OK! Here are some photos from before I actually put the gown back on and went inside…
Thanks to my partner Markus, not only for these photos, but for always supporting me both in life and in art. If you're wondering where that QR code points, here's the link: https://emilyvanartist.noblogs.org/qr/
Woman Story: Untitled 7 Artist: Emily van Lidth de Jeude
I once installed a show called Woman Story here in my home community. The core of Woman Story is a series of 24 portraits of bald, naked women drawn with graphite, crayon and acrylic wash onto reclaimed panels from my own home. They're actively expressing a complex array of experiences that inform woman-ness, but anonymously, because each of our stories might belong to any one of us.
At some point, a local I know distantly ‒ a retired judge and art collector ‒ came in to the gallery and sat down on the bench near the door. He stayed for about forty minutes. I eventually went to sit with him, and asked him what he thought of the show.
"Oh, I'm not here for the show." He answered. "I'm waiting for my ride."
"Ah. I see." What was I supposed to say next?
But he continued. "Is this your work?" He asked, bluntly.
"Yes."
"Well it's awful. An insult to women."
Woman Story: Untitled 18 Artist: Emily van Lidth de Jeude
I was completely shocked, but also curious, and asked, "Why do you feel that way?"
"They're bald," he answered, point blank. "Why would you be so disrespectful to women?"
"I drew them without hair in order to make them anonymous; to remove an identifier, and so their hairstyle doesn't speak to any potential prejudice or assumptions we make about people's hairstyle choices. But also to make their stories about everywoman."
He never once looked at me while he spoke. "They look like the bodies that came out of Buchenwald," he said. And then he was silent. And soon afterwards, his ride came.
Obviously, I could see his point. And, despite feeling regretful about possibly triggering trauma in people (my family definitely also carries trauma from WWII), I feel like maybe it's not a bad thing to have made this connection in my work. Because in war, women are also casualties. Women are also contributing to and leading both the offensive and the underground support systems. Women did come out of Buchenwald, dead. And women are found in shallow graves, abandoned vehicles, hospitals and landfills all over this world. It truly is awful, and I guess that's why I feel it needs to be told.
Here we are on the brink (or over the brink?) of WWIII, at the same time as we're experiencing a rise in femicide, exploitation, abuse and violence against women. It's not a coincidence. In our greed-based apathy we have allowed a very small handful of men to own and control our world. Most obviously, that's not acceptable! And what do strong women do when a situation is not acceptable? We make change. Women all over the world are protecting the vulnerable and building systems for survival, protection, and recovery, even as the war is only getting started.
Generally speaking, women are fully half of the world's population that knows from a deep generational place what exploitation, vulnerability and violence looks like ‒ and how to both survive and heal it. We're working throughout our communities, already, to build peace and resilience; to educate, support, and empower. Even to empower the women who foolishly allowed their fear to make them hate. We're working to bring and keep people together.
Woman Story: Untitled 16 Artist: Emily van Lidth de Jeude
We cannot rest. As born survivors, it's our strength and duty to not become bald bodies in concentration camps, mass graves, or landfills; to make sure our sisters, brothers, and children are also safe. To de-escalate fear and reactionary hatred before it harms us. A lot of us are already experienced with this. The rest of us can learn. We have to deal with our own crap and become our best selves, in order to show up for our world. And we have to start now.
There's work to do! I'm not talking about just directly protecting and defending, although there's a need for that, as well. I'm talking about building the world we need, so that it displaces the world of hate and greed that is being fed right now. And there are infinite ways we can do this. Some of us are out putting our bodies and voices on the line; putting ourselves in danger to inform and advocate. Some are donating money, time or skills to organizations that amplify our voices and work. Some of us are building networks and repositories for the protection of people, environment, information, culture, and as a whole, the future of our world. Some are educating and supporting our communities, so that we can have and maintain peace. And all of us, no matter what our lives look like or how limited we feel, can make conscious choices in every act we make to defy and devalue hatred, to promote love and peace, and to pull away from systems, corporations and ideologies that promote hatred.
Even when we feel weak, we can be strong. We are all challenged; women and men, too. That doesn't mean we're beaten. A challenge is, by definition, an opportunity to overcome. That's not just where we're at right now; it's who we are.
We are strong. We are capable. We are determined. We can do this.
I could see him drifting across the polished concrete floor of the convention centre, blue-jacketed arms spread into a perfect reflection of the very wide smile that punctuated his neatly-trimmed ebony beard. He was studying the very sad-looking portrait of my recently-divorced brother that adorns the train of the gown I had on display. He circled the gown slowly, hands splayed as if to catch every bit of story it offered, taking it in with sparkling eyes and smiling, smiling, until he looked into mine, and said, "did you make this?"
"Yes," I answered. "It's called '(dis)robe: Nursing Gown'. Tell me about your big smile!" And he told me he felt seen. We talked for a long while about how crippling our societal expectations can be for people of all genders. We talked about how trapped the painted man looked, even though he held the mannequin by a dog-collared lead. We talked about how the patriarchy crushes all but the wealthiest people–it was never about men versus women; it's just a few billion pawns fighting for survival under the shoe of someone much more powerful. And what if we were to work together, instead?
I just finished a four-day stint of exhibiting some of my wearable art pieces at the Art Vancouver fair. This gave me opportunity to reflect quite a bit on why I do what I do. My purpose as an artist hasn't changed, but it has deepened and I suppose I feel it more intensely, now. I'm here to connect people with each other, with their own authenticity, and with a more equitable, sustainable future. My art is a conversation-opener. Conversations like the one I had with this blue-jacketed man are the cornerstone of social change. They're the space where the change takes root in our hearts.
See those two people talking at the back of the image below? They're talking. Their hearts are making change. During this show I also spoke with many children who wondered what was "going on with the boobies" on that Nursing Gown, or whether they could touch the insects on the Gaia Gown, and I saw children pull their mothers around the skirt to identify the flowers they knew. People wondered where they might wear such unusual dresses, or why anybody would want to. "Definitely not to work!" One of them exclaimed.
The main piece of this winter's artistic journey for me was the Long Covid gown, '(dis)robe: Hospital Gown' (image at the top). It involved over 300 selfies contributed by Covid long-haulers from around the world, transferred to an altered donated hospital gown. From the back of the gown, trailing from a drawing of my son's hands (because when my Long Covid was at its worst, he used to help me walk by gently pushing my back), was a hospital-blanket train covered in some of the most common symptoms of Long Covid. These are the symptoms that millions of people worldwide live with every day, often confined to home or bed, invisibly. So the train is supported by a wheelchair that is also partially hidden. There's symbolism in everything I do, and this was my opportunity to give a voice to the millions of people who, like me, live mostly invisibly with Long Covid. And when I got too exhausted (shaky, blurred vision, heart palpitations) from wearing the gown and talking to people, I could just step back and sit in that wheelchair. A purpose-built wearable art piece! This is what comes of making art that truly deals with my own personal experience.
I invited many people from the Long Covid community to attend, so it was no surprise that this was a conversation piece for long-haulers, nurses and other health professionals. Some people even came to delight in finding their own faces on the gown! But it was also a chance for us all to be visible to others–many of whom had never realized Long Covid was happening in the world. Education is change-making.
This weekend was, for me, an opportunity to see other people becoming; changing, evolving, and questioning themselves. It was an opportunity to hug so very many lovely souls, and to express gratitude for their thoughts and opinions. There were people just visiting from afar, people who came to support artist friends, and people who were also showing work at the fair, or working to organize. There were people who came just to buy a pretty painting, but ended up chatting about climate change, gender politics, and the healthcare system. My own display confronted people with sometimes-difficult topics, and yet they bravely engaged. This reminded me that while we sometimes want to hide from challenges, humans are mostly courageous, and generous with our intentions.
I was not the only artist there trying to change the world through art. Humanity is a great kaleidoscopic spectrum of beautiful people, reaching across so many circumstantial divides to connect and thrive. We're like all the network of roots, mycelium, compost and microorganisms in the forest floor: a vibrant bubbling potion of hope, and a foundation for continued life. In following our own paths with so many tentative, compassionate feelers, we're finding our way.
In 2017 I began interviewing residents of BC's west coast on the subject of 'home'. I had some idea of where the topics might go, but I was surprised again and again by the amazingly heart-full, extremely unexpected, and often challenging stories that emerged. I've discovered through this work and other interview-based projects I've done that in any cross-section of humanity there will be a deep exploration of belonging, and a desire to make the best of always surprising circumstances. This project puts this on display.
However, the first iteration of this project was installed at Goleb in Amsterdam, as the culmination of my residency, there–a long way from home, you might say! But also not. I have family in the Netherlands, and began my art studies there, as well, so it is in fact a kind of displaced second home to me. I was invited to this residency by my friend and colleague, Igor Sevcuk, and received much support and feedback from him, his wonderful partner (and scientist and fellow artist) Go-Eun Im, other artists at Goleb, and of course my own partner, Markus Roemer. Not only did the project complete with this support, but also with visits and input from various Dutch friends and family of mine. The most amazing thing to me was that the stories and feelings from the West Coast of Canada translated perfectly to a Dutch audience. Amazing that we can take humanity from one side of the world, plop it down in another place, and we're still… human. With the same basic needs, and the same love.
Happily, though, now I get to bring the project back to where it began. And what a wonderful time we had putting up the dual-channel installation of w h a t . h o m e !
OK maybe it was a little stressful given the tight timeline, but we made it, and pretty sure we've survived! Here's a little video compilation of the process of installing. You'll see me sitting on the floor doing a video-interview with Rohit Joseph for CBC Radio's weekend morning show, North by Northwest. Here's the fifteen-minute interview, if you'd like to hear it. It really was a joy to talk to Rohit, and a highlight of my career at this point.
The opening was really incredible for me. Such a huge amount of support from my family, friends and community. I was totally blown away.
Probably the biggest shock for me though was the unexpected appearance of a fabulous kid I once taught in the Netherlands. I haven't seen her in about thirty years, and she, her mother, and her kids now live on the Sunshine Coast, and came to the show!! AND she's an artist!!! What a wonderful surprise to connect again. Yet another thing that made me realize how grateful I am for the life I'm privileged to have. Here are a few photos from the opening. Thanks to my son Taliesin and brother Adrian for the photos. 🧡
Also this guy!! Michael Gurney. What a fabulous reporter!! He came fully prepared, having already checked out the show and having a bunch of really good interesting questions about it. And his article shows he actually researched this quite thoroughly. I am truly honoured to have this show written about by him. He said some interesting things about it that even helped me understand it more, myself. Here's a link to the article he published: https://www.nsnews.com/local-arts/bowen-islanders-exhibition-at-gpag-is-homeward-bound-6574236
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. https://canadacouncil.ca
One of my favourite natural events is when the meadow floods. That's when the rain comes fast and the creek that normally flows through the alder forest comes out around the trees to run across the compact paths between long grasses, creating two- to thirty-centimetre-deep creeks that speed along, where in summer, bare-footed dogs and children run. In winter, I've run these temporary creeks in bare feet too. I know the feeling of the mud and wet grasses between my toes, and the fear of stepping in drowned dog poop. The joy of the immersion is too great to be daunted by the threat of poop. As I've grown older, though, I've come to appreciate the benefits of good rain gear and tall boots, which allow me to dive into my landscape without physical repercussions.
Diving into landscape is something I've been thinking about a lot, lately: How, through residencies and travel and schooling or working abroad, artists aim to really immerse ourselves in different landscapes, to come home refreshed and inspired; often longing to return again to the exotic and wonderfully wild places we visited. We make art during or after these travels that sometimes explores the longing, the wildness or the bodies-in-place-ness of where we were; sometimes the brokenness of our human emotional existence across a diversity of different locations.
But pandemic and carbon-footprint considerations have led many of us to think deeply about the value and sacrifice of these muse-journeys. It's not only the air-travel that's a problem. There's also a problem with small villages taking a great percentage of their income from residence-tourism, or just tourism in general; when the actual residents of the community become dependent upon visits by people who will never actually become engaged in or contribute to the community as residents do, but only as grateful residence-artists. I live in a small community that gleans some of our income from tourism, and I know exactly how damaging a million tourist footprints are to the ecology of the place my own bare feet feel at home. I know how they take photos of this beautiful place, but never deeply understand the ecology; how they go home to write travel-blogs that extol the quaintness and quietness of my home but fail to capture the realness of our people; the political and social crises we feel, and even the imminent threat to the forests, fields, and beaches they're photographing. Once when I was small, my parents were out by the road cutting a tree into rounds for firewood–a gruelling job they did every year to keep our family warm–and some tourists drove up and stopped to watch them. They never got out of their car; just stopped to watch for a while and then drove away again.
I felt the other side of this problematic story keenly during my own residence in Amsterdam, a few years ago. I stayed and installed a project in the Goleb Project Space run by my friends Igor and Go-Eun. They welcomed and supported me graciously and while my experience was expansive, I noticed that the below-surface politics of the centre were very different than what I was experiencing as a visitor to the space. I wondered how my presence there had perhaps displaced others' work or intentions; how my ideas had changed the dialogue or intention of the group. Goleb is in one of the more mundane urban areas of Amsterdam, so I didn't think too much about my ecological impact, but one afternoon that changed. I was walking along the gracht (a small waterway for which we have no English word), getting closer and closer to an adorable family of coots, attempting to photograph them in what I thought was a remarkably interesting way, and a pair of men sitting on a bench nearby told me off for disturbing the wildlife. I reminded myself of the tourists I complain about, here in Canada. I had truly no idea of those coots' ecological value, nor who the guys on the bench were, or the stories they brought to that moment. It was all just an afternoon distraction from the project I was working on.
Then came the pandemic; the shutting down of most international travel. And the growing list of climate change disasters claiming our cultural, personal, and ecological heritage. Personally, I can't reconcile travel with artistic purpose anymore. I'm not even sure I can justify travelling overseas to visit family. So I'm thinking a lot about how we can be engaged and inspired by place without the inherent damage of travel.
The Un-Boxing Exhibition, arranged by Gudrun Filipska, Caroline Kelley, Lenka Clayton and Carly Butler of the Arts Territory Exchange, on arrival, here at Plas Bodfa, in Wales. Photo by Julie Upmeyer.
What if travel isn't necessary to become immersed in landscape, or even to experience exotic places? We've already proven quite thoroughly that many of the business- and organizational-meetings we used to travel for can be done over the internet. I joined my brother's birthday dinner by video-chat, and have attended a couple of symposiums by Zoom. Artists have always found ingenious ways of making art in collaboration and across time and space through the mail, telephone, internet, and travelling exhibitions or projects. For me and many others, the creative solutions were often borne out of financial or temporal necessity, but now perhaps we can make these choices also out of concern for our future.
My work about my own Pacific Island, on a staircase in Wales. Plas Bodfa. Photo: Julie Upmeyer
I'm including photos, here, of the Un-Boxing project I am honoured to be participating in, this year–a travelling box of works that examines ideas of place, travel, gifting, and time, as well as the delight of opening parcels. It seems a bit meta to me, and I can see how it might inspire a lot of searching and thoughtful dialogue. My entire experience of this show, so far, has been through others' lenses. For me personally it's reignited my passion for the hyper-local: If this is the view of my experience through others' lenses, what is the view of my experience, through mine? Or their experience of my contribution, re-experienced by me? I'm not a huge fan of navel-gazing, and now this sounds like meta-meta-meta, but maybe in trying to reevaluate our engagement with space and time and each other we can find new ways of experiencing.
In a symposium I attended virtually today about mobility, spatiality and virtuality in Iceland, artist Zuhaitz Aziku of Strondin Studio suggested that we need to "make people realize that they're buying experience. Because you cannot ever buy experience." The experience is what comes from what we put into anything. Whether Zuhaitz intended this or not, he made me realize that experience doesn't need to be far away to be exotic. I've been exploring the exotic of my own backyard for over forty years. How can there be anything exotic in my own backyard, when my body knows every inch of it so well? Because, as Zuhaitz helped me to realize, my experience of this place changes with every moment. My intention and what I take away depends on how I engage, and that, too, changes with every moment.
I think we travel in order to escape the routine of our lives; to break our minds from the same parade of sensual input we receive every day. It's easier to take a different view if we remove ourselves from our routines. But maybe that's just lazy. Maybe we can train ourselves to look differently every day; to pass the same places but never in the same ways. Maybe we can practice closing our eyes and listening to things we normally only see, or lying down in places we normally only stand. When I stop running through the meadow and crawl, instead, I discover that rodents have created pathways under the mat of grass. I find insects leaving trails of detritus inside these covered runways. It's like an entirely exotic world to the one I stood in just a moment before. When I run through that meadow in the flood, I feel a kind of sensory freedom that doesn't in any way compare to the way that grass feels in the summer. I wonder where the rodents go when the creek runs through their pathways. If I learn all of this, it won't be exotic anymore, but something new will happen tomorrow; there will be new questions and new experiences and new ways of engaging with this space. There will be new ways of experiencing and inspiring. I won't have to leave this place to find them.
Can I live in place in my own backyard and call it a residency? I sure as hell reside here, and the more I stay home, confined by pandemic and financial restrictions; my own ethical concerns around carbon footprint and supporting large corporate airlines, the more I see the value in this. Maybe we can adjust the expectation of worldliness in our artistic practices for the benefit of our common future. And far from becoming navel-gazing meta, our practices will expand into our spaces in a way that they never could when we were busy escaping for exotic experiences. We can use our art as a means for researching, understanding, and bettering ourselves and our own communities, in place.
"Children are the most disrespected group of people in the world."
She turned her small face and looked at me intensely, maybe to see how I would react; maybe to be sure I heard her. She was one of a group of three teens who had just come through an installation about children's rights and left her comments behind. I hoped she felt respected by me as she walked out of the gallery.
And then it hit me: "Group of people." That's how we see them. We see them as separate from us until we judge them to be old, wise, or experienced enough to earn our respect – as adults. We determine their clothing, their food, their education and other activities, their freedom to come or go and quite often we even determine their friends and hobbies. They tell us their fears and hopes and great big plans and we pat them on the shoulders and ignore them; carry on with our lives. When do we look them in the face and ask them to tell us more? When do we ask their advice? When do we heed it?
I grew up and eventually returned to raise my kids on a small island. For longer than I've been alive, the teens from this island have boarded a ferry five or more days per week to attend school on the mainland. Unchaperoned. As a teen I got up at six-thirty, washed my hair under the tap, dressed, put on my makeup and left to walk to the ferry at seven. In the winter I arrived at the dock with my hair frozen like brown sticks around my face. Unlike some of the other girls, I did not push into the crowded washroom to fix it in the two tiny mirrors. I sat at the end of my age-group of kids, watching the same kids get beat up day after day, watching the animated conversation of some girls I wasn't friends with, picking at the Naugahyde seats and avoiding the splash of the food fights. I moved further down when people started bringing compost to throw.
Twenty minutes each way. Morning and afternoon. The ferry commute was a drag, and a shared ritual, and also the rocking, floating bridge between the confines of childhood and the expected freedom of adulthood. In the 80's we skipped school by going en masse to the mall first thing, then arriving at school before lunch to report that we were all late because the ferry was late. We sometimes argued about the ethics of how to accomplish this feat. We shared time every day, but we were individuals. We had different stories, different values, and different lives.
Our island also has a history of ferry exclusion. As a public-private entity, the ferry corporation has the right to ban people, and they have done so on various occasions that I remember. They banned a teenager in my grade for vandalism and mischief. He eventually took the ferry with a chaperone to attend school. They also banned our local petty criminal because the police thought it would do him good to get out of the community where he regularly slept in parked cars and picked drunken fights in public. It didn't help. Community members transported him back to the island in the trunks of their cars. My point is that these people, too, are individuals.
At various times we've had issues arise on the busiest ferry runs, like unidentified persons vandalizing the boat or flooding the toilets, and sometimes the first response is for the captain to make announcements to the teens. He tells them, as a group, to smarten up and behave themselves. He tells the adults on the next commuter run to rein in their children. Recently people in the community have been wondering aloud in public why teens (again, as a group) can't just behave themselves for twenty minutes at a time. Few, if any of us, know what the current transgression is, but we know it's been committed by teens. The captain has reportedly announced to our teens that if the unnamed incidents don't stop, the police will be involved and the surveillance footage will be reviewed. For me that crossed a line.
If criminal acts are being committed, it's perfectly reasonable to check surveillance footage and involve police. It's perfectly reasonable to expect people not to commit such acts, and to take steps to ensure that they stop. It is not, however, reasonable to reprimand, admonish, threaten and sometimes (as I have witnessed) deny service or civility to an entire group of people based on the premise that one or a few of them are suspected of having done something wrong.
When adults smoke on the ferry (which is wholly a no-smoking/no-vaping zone), they are asked to butt out. If they refuse, they are taken to the chief steward's office and spoken to, as individuals. I've seen this happen. I've stood at the chief steward's office while an adult smoker was being spoken to, and every effort was made to treat me with respect and provide me with service despite the fact that I, too, am an adult. The same can't be said for our teens' experience. Every teen is a suspect in some people's reasoning.
What do you think that does to a person? Imagine if every day you walked to work only to be eyed suspiciously at the door to the building, and every time a toilet overflowed, people called all the adults in the building together to reprimand them. How would you feel about using the toilet? Imagine if, when some person stole from the vending machine, they denied all adults access to the vending machines. Would you respect the people who judged you? Would you still care about upholding the values of your community if you weren't expected to uphold them anyway?
I'm responsible for denigrating teens as a group, too. When I was barely more than a teenager myself, a truck full of students from a nearby high school pulled up to my grandmother's lawn, dumped an assortment of fast food wrappers out the window, and drove off. A few years later, walking along our island road with my four-year-old son, we spied some litter in the ditch. He immediately shook his head and muttered grumpily, "ach… teenagers". I can't remember how I led him to that assumption, but I am certain I did. Now he's seventeen. He and his sister have somehow managed to get through a bunch of teenagehood without dumping their trash. Even more than navigating teen years myself, parenting teens has taught me to see them as individuals.
Teens are worthy of our attention as individuals. They are humans learning to be adults, and counting on our respect and exemplary modeling to help them navigate their surprising, sometimes frightening individual journeys. If we want them to see adults as individuals rather than a homogeneous, brooding group, we need to model to them how to do that. We need to see them, and we need to show them how seeing people is done well.
Some teens are children. They have an innocent wisdom not yet drawn out of them by the pressures of growing up. Some teens are also adults. They know their own minds and they know when they haven't done wrong. Some teens see us when we're wrong, and they know when we aren't hearing their voices. Some teens know when not to bother speaking up, because we've lumped them all into one disrespected group and we can't hear their individual cries. In fact, when teens report crimes committed by adults, they are often ignored.
It's time we look into the faces of the children and teens we pass and see them as simply humans. It's time we see them as individuals with wisdom, needs, values, and human rights. It's time we respect them.
*The handwritten statements accompanying this article were contributed by teens at a 2019 installation of a piece called "Building Blocks: What do you want the adults in your life to know and respect about you?"
