Firmly rooted in the handmade, this exhibition brings together three quilts and a series of screenprints. The quilts, developed over years, were a slow labour of love, made with hand marbled fabrics, screen printed gradients, quilting and appliqué. The screenprints begin as photocopy based collaged compositions, which are later developed into multi-layer prints.
The materiality and patience within the work reflects a desire to connect more deeply across time to the human and non-human world. Waxing and waning cycles of life and death appear as the worm travels in the soil, or the moon across the sky. Familiar landscapes collide with the dream world and myth, where earthly delights and imaginary beings exist in the same strange place. Seeds, water droplets, toads, tiny winged creatures, a crying giant, moons, skies and horizons all meet in unknown worlds outside linear time.
Most of this work was made at Nauta’s studio on Toronto Island, 30ft from the shores of Lake Ontario. Her process includes walking around, staring at bodies of water, looking for turtles, noticing patterns and shapes, trying to pay attention, and closely focusing in. Time spent at the Toronto Reference Library, researching and collecting images, forms the other part of her process.
The exhibition title ‘the world has left the earth behind it’ comes from Pig Earth, a novel by John Berger, documenting a changing world turning away from the realities of the body, mortality and the earth itself.
The materiality and patience within the work reflects a desire to connect more deeply across time to the human and non-human world. Waxing and waning cycles of life and death appear as the worm travels in the soil, or the moon across the sky. Familiar landscapes collide with the dream world and myth, where earthly delights and imaginary beings exist in the same strange place. Seeds, water droplets, toads, tiny winged creatures, a crying giant, moons, skies and horizons all meet in unknown worlds outside linear time.
Most of this work was made at Nauta’s studio on Toronto Island, 30ft from the shores of Lake Ontario. Her process includes walking around, staring at bodies of water, looking for turtles, noticing patterns and shapes, trying to pay attention, and closely focusing in. Time spent at the Toronto Reference Library, researching and collecting images, forms the other part of her process.
The exhibition title ‘the world has left the earth behind it’ comes from Pig Earth, a novel by John Berger, documenting a changing world turning away from the realities of the body, mortality and the earth itself.
