Debra Sloan | Les Grande Dames

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Debra Sloan, “Untitled,” 2024

(courtesy of the Craft Council of BC)

Les Grande Dames is an assemblage of figures depicting women as distinct entities. Sloan's objective has been to add her visual voice to those who have been and are involved in repositioning the rights and personhood of women. This is also a cautionary tale. Women’s rights have existed only within narrow bands of history and usually involving only a portion of the world’s women, which, during this last century, some have been experiencing - but storm clouds loom.

One of her figurative sources has been the virtuosic and singular portrayals found in the terracotta ‘Court Lady’ tomb figures of the Tang Dynasty (618-906AD). It has been posited that these figures, depicted with great charm and verve, are actual portraits of specific court ladies, along with their competing hairstyles.

Her yearning has been to say so much and with such economy, as did the great Tang artists. But rarely for her. Instead, it is a skirmish back and forth with compositional, technical, or conceptual revisions. She does take some comfort in the thought that it may be through the misstep, the flaw, or the cracked note where observer/artist connections are bridged.

Artist talk, July 18, 2024, Carosel theatre, 1411 Cartwright Street from 7:00pm