Libby Hague | My Story of Sublimation

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Libby Hague, "Sea crossing (detail)," 2022-23

woodcut and coloured paper, 100 x 34.5 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

Opening Reception & Artist’s Talk: Saturday, March 4, 6-9 PM

In sublimation, ice transforms directly into a gas: seeming to skip a step, it disappears. This work is about the mystery of changing states, of disappearing from one form and assuming another. It stretches the imagination as it tries to picture the other side of life.

Over time my father who was a physicist and an engineer, could no longer find his way home. Despite his forgetfulness (alzheimer’s) he always delighted in the idea of sublimation. “Do you know what sublimation is?” he would ask. Tell me again, I would answer. “Sublimation is when ice is transformed directly into a gas without melting”. It seems to skip this intermediate step and just disappears.

This work is about the mystery of changing states, of disappearing from one form and assuming another. It speculates, stretching the imagination, as it tries to picture the other side of life.

Sublimation combines two bodies of work. The first, Simple Gifts, is a woodcut installation that began as a response to migration crises and broadened into a story of people in desperate circumstances seeking a better life by helping each other and themselves. It’s three sections are modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, a descent into brutality, an escape story and a resting place. The resting place is also a vision of heaven, that is, the hope of reuniting with family and friends.

The second, Bring me the Sunset in a Cup, derives from the fundamental weirdness of augmented reality experiments. In time bending experiments, small vignettes are part of feedback loops from woodcut to AR to watercolour and back. It glimpses worlds/people/states that are invisible for one reason or another; in particular, it looks at the moment of transformation from one state to another. After all, I am my father’s daughter.

About the Artist

Libby Hague, RCA, BFA (Honours), Concordia University, is a Toronto printmaker and a member of Open Studio. Her curiosity and inventiveness inform her hybrid practice of large, immersive print installations examining human and social relationships in our precarious world. Recent exhibitions include a retrospective, The past is never over, Art Gallery of Mississauga; Every Heart can Grow Bigger: make room, O.D.D. Gallery, Dawson, Yukon; On this Wondrous Sea, Karachi Biennale, Pakistan; Every Heart can Grow Bigger, Gallery Stratford; International Print Triennial, Krakow, Poland; Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt; Over the Horizon, Open Studio, Toronto and MOVEMENT Toronto<>Vienna. www.libbyhague.com