speaking in skins and skirts
jane kenyon & jude neale
july 6 - august 3, 2023
ccbc shop & gallery
A textile artist and a poet come together in an exhibition based on friendship and mutual appreciation; one medium sparks the other in a confluence of ideas and inspiration.
The artist find herself revisiting themes of femaleness and autonomy through mythology, narrative, figurative exploration or abstract expression. Decades of friendship and artistic expression have allowed her to persevere in the face of heartbreak, hopelessness and rage.
Jane has been making, destroying and remaking her artworks for decades. Recent work with recycled clothing feels like a further exploration of the permanence/impermanence of materials, perhaps an attempt to salvage their usefulness for her. Our domestic cloth, be it clothing, or other household fabrics, eventually makes its way to the landfills, where it slowly disintegrates and returns to the earth, or not. Working with these frail, worn-out textiles, Jane, feels like a tender gift, an opportunity to rediscover their marks, shapes, and stories, perhaps creating new histories and future possibilities.
The Skin Series was begun early in the pandemic during a year of uncertainty when physical vulnerability and human resilience went hand-in-hand. Jude Neale’s stream-of-consciousness poem, Where We Stood, provided the impetus for this ongoing body of Jane’s work about our journeys – those hundreds of conversations that have occurred over the years between two women, mothers, poets and artists.
Through this exhibition, these two artists aim to share the methods and means of artist and writer working together, both sustaining work over a long period in productive collaboration and coming together to focus the working collaboration for exhibition; in other words, to speak the language of that communication fluently.
Jane Kenyon was born in Canada in 1953 and currently works out of her home studio in North Vancouver BC. She began her working life as a medical doctor but had always been drawn to a career in visual art. In 1993, Kenyon began to study and work as an artist full-time.
Her early artistic life was as a fibre artist, with most of her art career spent in contemporary embroidery. Searching for a more intuitive and immediate form of personal expression, Kenyon turned to non-objective painting about 10 years ago. Recently, she has returned to her beloved fibre and is exploring mark-making and contemporary stitch on recycled t-shirts and other found fabrics.
Kenyon’s art, including fibreart and works on canvas and paper, has been widely shown and collected. She has exhibited and won awards in Canada, USA, Europe and South Korea.
Jude Neale is a Canadian classically trained opera singer, educator, mentor, and prolific poet. She is a mezzo soprano who specializes in Puccini. Much of her poetry reflects her background in its musical cadence and timbre.
She was nominated for the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence based on her use of poetry as the lynchpin of her curriculum. Many of her ex-students have also followed the writing path and attributed her influence as a key to their own journey. Furthermore, Jude was mentored by the acclaimed poet and novelist, Elisabeth Harvor, through Humber College in Toronto. During this two year process she wrote over 500 poems and produced her first book, The Perfect Word Collapses. She also attended The Writer’s Workshop at Simon Fraser University, a programme run by Betsy Warland, and was mentored by Rachel Rose, Poet Laureate of Vancouver. She published A Quiet Coming of Light from this experience. It went on to be finalist for The Pat Lowther Award out of the League of Canadian Poets.
Her book Splendid in its Silence won publication in the UK. One of its poems was chosen to ride on buses on the Channel Islands by the Poet Laureate of Britain, Sir Andrew Motion. She was also the feature reader at the Guernsey International Literary Festival in the UK. Jude collaborated with Bonnie Nish to produce, Cantata in Two Voices which was published by Ekstasis Editions. This book was written in 50 days!
Her poem, Blue Bowl, was shortlisted in the prestigious Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry prize out of Ireland. And she has been widely published nationally and internationally. Jude has written eight books, with Impromptu, Ekstasis Editions, just being released. This book was based on International Poetry Prompts for Poetry month.