Touching the Sky
Touching the Sky
How can an artwork capture the dynamic experience of space? What does the smell of rain look like in a painting? Or our dream experiences in relationship to our waking experiences? Even in a moment when the landscape appears still, there is tons of activity happening that cannot be captured in a single frame—from the intricate and complex patterns of weather and climate to the buzzing of cellular exchanges on a micro level. The landscape is alive, and fluctuating—and so is our own journey through it. As we move through the world, we experience a wonderful abundance of senses, thoughts, and feelings, as our bodies respond to, absorb, and contribute to our surroundings. For millennia, artists have imaginatively worked to translate these embodied experiences, including phenomena that extend beyond the visual senses like smell, touch, emotion, spirituality, sound, and time. Balancing between abstract marking and painterly realism, Touching the Sky features three Peace Region artists whose work is rooted in exploring these embodied experiences and our ability to represent them through art.
Working with watercolours, Angela Fehr embraces the ephemeral nature of water in relationship to her depiction of the landscape, allowing her experience of the materials and the elements to shift the direction of the artwork. Inspired by Theosophists from her matrilineal history, dreams, and philosophies of matter, Esther Hoflick questions the separation of the body from the world, blurring the distinction between external and internal, as well as the interrelations between the painter, painting materials, and environment. Inspired by nostalgia as an experience, Elizabeth Hutchinson’s artworks combine her ecological memory of the landscape along the Atlantic coast with the personal significance of the same location as it lives in her memory. Each of the artworks in Touching the Sky hover between our ability to represent space, and our environment’s profound shaping of our daily experiences. As Elizabeth Hutchinson writes, “More than a collection of images, they are a gathering of memories that remind us of the poetic potential of our collective emotional relationship to the landscape.”
Curated by Robyn Lynch
Featured Image : Slow Steps, 2024, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Watercolour on paper, Collection of the artist
Featured Artists
Angela Fehr
Perhaps resilience is the only option for a northern artist. Born in the Peace River region, Angela Fehr returned there to settle after spending her childhood in Ontario, the USA and Papua New Guinea. A childhood love of art led her to take her first watercolour classes at the Dawson Creek Art Gallery, and isolation as a stay at home mum led her to reach out to communicate to other artists via YouTube and teaching watercolour lessons online. That same resilience is what helped Angela realize that the key to creating her most authentic work came, not from flawless technique, but in giving herself permission to fall in love with the painting process, regardless of outcome. Watercolour has become Angela’s way of interpreting her world, expressing her connection to the beauty of the Peace Region, and the lessons she has learned through watercolour have filled her life with meaning and significance. Angela lives with her husband and three teenagers on an acreage overlooking Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Her art and classes can be found online at AngelaFehr.com.
Elizabeth Hutchinson
“I am fascinated by the overlap between our ecological memories and our inner narratives. Once, I played in the woods, chased streams, and caught water skippers by following their shadows. Small children understand what treasure is. They fill their pockets with stones and feathers. They pull wildflowers for the ones they love. Children connect with nature effortlessly, with no need for anyone to teach them. There is a hidden narrative I was told somewhere along the way, that nature is a pristine ‘other’ that only thrives when I am not near. I want to tell our children a different truth. That nature thrives inside them and the wind longs for them to dance. An entire world ebbs and flows in response to our movement. We are part of a symbiotic web where all of our actions have repercussions for the pulse of life around us. The rocks at our feet hold our memories. No wonder they are treasures collected by little hands. The sublime sits unnoticed in our daily lives and waits for us to hold our breath in wonder.
My images in ‘Touching the Sky’ are expressive works that draw on more than the immediate and visual. They explore our relationship with place and concepts of belonging. They become recollections of sensation; the feeling of wind, the rustle of long grass, the smell of earth. I am amazed at how a specific hue of green or the angle of a horizon line can instantly connect a viewer to their own experiences. More than a collection of images, they are a gathering of memories that remind us of the poetic potential of our collective emotional relationship to the landscape.”
Esther Hoflick
I am fascinated both by materials and by philosophies of matter. Specifically, I’m curious how we perceive ourselves in relation to the physical world and how these intrinsic perceptions are paralleled, metaphorically, by the act of creating visual objects.
In consequence, I’ve been thinking in terms of new materialist philosophies which are an environmentalist and feminist way to interpret the interactions between internal perceptions and the external world. Fluctuating between representation and abstraction, my artworks use the malleability of visual language to address these ambiguities of perception.
I am currently painting with an oil emulsion on plaster where the pigment and surface become inseparable, much as we are inseparable from our physical environment. I think of the paintings as objects in the world and so place the works in conversations amongst themselves and with the space around them. By filtering my own experiences of place and body through neo-materialist thought processes and the act of painting itself, images surface, hover indeterminately. The paintings reference an almost schizophrenic understanding of the rhizomatic nature of all and everything, while brooding on specific moments of intra-activity. The paint soaks into the surface, and yet is removable by sanding and scraping, thus the images are permitted to emerge, and then rebutted; subtle and surrounded by a blankness. The interpretation of image, or the hunt for it thus evokes an awareness of perception; the paintings, as objects, take over some of the control. My paintings address the inextricability of meaning, nonsense, myself, or the world, from myself, itself: from matter.
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