Strathbutler contenders | The weaver
In the warp and weft of her weaving, Fredericton artist Linda Brine reconstructs images of western femininity, shooting them through with glimmering threads of meaning and metaphor.
"One of the over-arching things I've been interested in is how women are depicted in the western canon," she says by phone Wednesday.
Brine mines sources personal and historical, ancient and iconic in her work. She cuts up pictures of women ranging from reprinted shots of her mother and grandmother from the family photo album to posters of pop culture icons such as Marilyn Monroe to images of the Madonna or a pair of lips from a newspaper, reworking them on her loom.
They are woven through with metallic threads that offer a beautiful light and reflective property to her work. But Brine says their function is more than aesthetic: they are a way of hinting at unseen, external elements.
"In my visual language it stands for spiritual matters."
The craft of weaving is itself heavily laden with associations. Historically viewed as women's work, it is a pervasive theme in mythology and literature, from Penelope in Homer's The Odyssey to Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot.
Adding to those layers of meaning are the symbols Brine weaves into her work, especially the diamond, an ancient pagan symbol of duality that she says is not divisive, but is a call for a unity of male and female.
Brine, who mostly drew before she felt the lure of the loom, came to the craft more by accident than design. She moved to Fredericton in 1989, around the same time as she was beginning to make hand-bound books. She became friends with the director of the textiles program at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, who convinced her to take a weaving class at the school.
"It changed my life," Brine says. She moved away from drawing and working with landscape images and representational art to weaving.
Her technique and style evolved from the traditional Japanese technique "Saganishiki" in which metallic paper is woven with silk. In the course of six or seven years of research on the topic, Brine found a woman in Japan who still practiced the art and who accepted an invitation to visit Gallery Connexion in Fredericton in 1997.
There are profound differences between art and craft, she says. With craft, Brine says, "it was about materials, it was tactile, it was about making, it was about pattern, it was about metaphor."
Brine is encouraged by a new discourse in the craft world that is promoting the idea that craft can be conceptual.
In preparation for an upcoming show at the University of New Brunswick called Darkness and Light, she is building on her large portrait work with new life-size pieces that bring the viewer face-to-face with Brine's subjects.
If she wins the Strathbutler, she knows exactly how she would spend the $15,000 award: on a trip to Japan.
"I have been completely enthralled with Japan," she says. She admires the country's high regard for craft and its "relationship to time and work and labour and inspiration and being present."
"That's my dream."
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