Dorothy Field: HANDS, FEET, FACES

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Dorothy Field, "Hands Triad," 2017

mixed media

DOROTHY FIELD: HANDS, FEET, FACES

Opens Friday 12 March, 7-9pm

Artist Talk Sunday 21 March @ 2pm (via Zoom)

For several years, Dorothy Field has been playing with the idea of creating imagery and then interrupting it. Repeatedly printing the same etching plates, she incorporates different, sometimes unconventional ways of shifting the theme. Inspired by Betty Goodwin's vest series and the way she liberated the press, Field placed her ancient garden gloves on a copper plate prepared with soft ground and ran them through the press to create an etching plate. Later, she did the same with her Tai Chi shoes.

Field has also been working with the human face using the very direct lift print technique. "Of particular interest are the faces of people we might consider “Other.” I collage these lift prints with scraps of etchings and the odds and ends of papers that float around my studio. I incorporate text as a visual element for its rhythm and sense of message, even when I don't know the language or it is obscured in some way."

The substrate is integral to the work; most sheets of paper were made by the artist with imported and local fibres using Japanese and Nepalese techniques. The pieces represent a marriage of paper and image with the paper more than just a vehicle to carry them. The artist's interest is non-narrative, exploring the many ways an image can be stretched, obscured, and overlapped while still retaining the image or its shards. The resulting work is additive and layered, created intuitively. The body of work engages the accidental, the imperfect, and happenstance. 

Artist's Bio

Dorothy Field moved to Canada in 1971, after completing an MA in Design at UC Berkeley, specializing in textiles. In the '80s she began making Nepalese and Japanese style paper as a way to escape the loom's constraints. In the '90s she began printmaking with Susy Raxlen, a Montreal-trained printer: Field made the plates; Raxlen did the printing. In 2008, Field started printing her own work at Ground Zero Printmakers Society. Now, with a press in her basement, she prints unglued pieces of paper and adheres them to a base sheet of handmade paper in ways that interrupt the natural continuity of the image.

Just as she left the rigidity of the loom, she has not followed the discipline of traditional printmaking: "I have total respect for those who do, but that will never be me."

Field is the author of three books of poetry, an extended essay illustrated with her photos of the ways paper is used in Asia to connect with the gods, a book of garden letters, and a children's book about a family in India who blockprints cloths for the worship of the Mother Goddess. After thirty years on a farm in Cobble Hill, she now “farms” her Victoria backyard, sharing her space with vegetables, fruit, and a native plant corner.