SuperNatural by Tor Lukasik Foss
To hear Lorraine Roy tell it, nobody decides to be an artist suddenly – it happens in increments. “My mother taught me to sew and let me do all kinds of things with her big box of scrap fabric. I loved playing around,” she says. “Even though I can confidently say that I never made a piece of clothing I ever wanted to wear, I always loved to sew. It just took me a long time to think about using it as a means to make art.”
Roy describes how she became an artist as an accumulation of skills and interests and experiences. Those factors have slowly woven themselves into a successful arts practice, one she runs from her Greensville home and studio (a space she shares with her husband, photographer Janusz Wrobel, also a successful full-time artist). In a way, this story is very much like the textile art she produces: a collage of disparate elements that somehow manage to weave together to form a fluid and cohesive image.
“My first inclination was to science, so I never entertained the possibility of an arts education, pursuing instead a degree in Ornamental Horticulture, specializing in native trees. After graduating, it was great working in garden centres, but it’s hard work and in the winter it’s quite cold, particularly in London where I was living at the time. So I began looking for other things to do. London had a great Embroiderers’ Guild and I managed to get myself involved with some great workshops. It really got me going, got me thinking that there might some kind of future for me in art.”
If there was any crystallizing moment for Roy, it likely came in 2002 when, with the help of an OAC grant, Roy was able to produce a touring exhibition of wall hangings called Saving Paradise. It consisted of tapestry portraits of 17 rare species of trees. The exhibition toured 13 public and private galleries throughout the province and by the end of the tour, every work in the exhibition had sold. “That show really gave me the boost I needed,” Roy acknowledges. “It gave me the confidence to truly consider myself a full-time artist. An interesting side effect is that I became known for trees. And to some extent, that means trees are going to remain a big part of my practice.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the kind of psychic space Roy’s work occupies. On one hand her images owe something to the kind of sketches you find in a botanist’s field journal – a fascination with the minutiae and precise details of the subject matter. Yet this clinical curiosity is matched by fluid transitions of colour and texture and line, patterns that pulls the images away from the scientific and plunges them deeply in the realm of poetry.
The layering and patterning that typifies Roy’s work is part of a technique she developed herself. Wanting to retain the strengths of embroidery while minimizing its slow, hard on the eyes aspects, Roy devised a way to mesh all the pieces of fabric together on a background, and added elements on top with appliqué and embroidery, and finally quilt over the top to give a kind of unifying texture to the entire piece. This allows Roy to work faster and on a bigger scale. It’s still an involved and intricate process, but Roy insists that it allows her to produce work without getting bogged down or frustrated.
The biggest challenge in making the work, she says, is maintaining a stock of fabric and threads large and diverse enough to allow her to create the subtly shifting and complex fields of colour. Sourcing material is a major time component of her practice.
“I’m lucky now to have a big studio space, and just looking around it I can see a big rack with three big levels to house larger pieces of fabric,a baker’s rack for smaller pieces separated into colours, then six large laundry baskets filled
“Organization is a big part of the work,” she concedes. “Sourcing the fabric is also a fair bit of fun. I love going to old fabric stores in small towns where you can dig up leftovers from the ’60s. I’m also lucky to have enough friends passing on the remnants from their sewing projects. It’s important to have a lot of sources because fabric stores will only ever carry colours that are in style, and to make this kind of work you need a full spectrum of colour. So second hand stores are essential. It’s like walking through a garden of burrs with a fur coat on – it just collects on you as you go along.”
The last few years have seen Lorraine Roy pushing beyond trees. Her recent works are still heavily based in the natural world, but have stretched into very organic abstracts, or studies into pond life, seeds and roots. An exhibition slated for the Grimsby Public Art Gallery this fall, will be a series of seed and pod studies. Roy’s abstracts and stream studies are even more subjective. Spotted gar fish are camouflaged within a cubist mélange of plant leaves, water streams and coloured detritus. Pure abstract pieces bristle with the organic minimalism of Kandinsky; they are simultaneously spiritual and natural mediations on colour and line.
“Some people who know me for trees will look at the abstract work and will get it immediately. Others refuse to even look at it. What’s important is pushing myself creatively. I will always go back to trees, but because of this new work, it means I will go back to them differently, think and design them differently.”
