Penelope Stewart & Laura Vickerson

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Laura Vickerson, 2017

photo credit Laura Vickerson, 2017

Medalta Museum is an historic site, a once thriving ceramic factory comprising now a museum, contemporary art gallery, artist studios and residencies. Penelope Stewart and Laura Vickerson have been invited to participate in the artist in residence programme during the month of July. Both artists have worked extensively with historic site locations and were offered one of the historic, large-scale, domed beehive kilns to create a collaborative installation. During a site visit they were inspired by the industrial kilns, and machinery, the extensive collection of moulds, the archives and general detritus of the moribund factory history.

house life, refers to the agency and historic manufacture of the domestic objects at Medalta. Stewart and Vickerson began the collaboration with conversations that explored the convergence and overlap of their individual practice’s. Re-current themes address notions of feminism, cultural memory, time and space with an interest in the symbolic nature of objects, domestic and postindustrial architecture and landscapes. They are interested in finding places to intervene, inhabit while activating the objects and the site. They agreed to create individual works that would over the life of the residency intersect, growing into the other and in essence be in open conversation.

Penelope Stewart’s multi-disciplinary practice, sculpture, photography and works on paper, is primarily the making of expansive installations that develop in situ and in close interaction to the surrounding environs. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a tile museum in France, or Dawson College’s Peace Garden, Montreal, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

Stewart was born in Montréal, Québec. She received a BFA from York University, Toronto and an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her work has been exhibited since 1990 with key solo exhibitions in Canada, Australia, France, Czech Republic and the US. Stewart is the recipient of numerous grants and awards from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Arts Council’s. Her large-scale photographs received First Prize at Photo-Op, Toronto, and at the prestigious Centre for the Perceptual Arts, (CEPA), New York. In 2010, she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts (RCA). Stewart currently lives in Toronto.

Laura Vickerson is a Calgary-based installation artist and educator. She is presently a Professor at the Alberta College of Art & Design. Her art production varies in form, medium and scale from more intimate garment-based works made with gauze and/or wax to large-scale installations involving rose petals pinned to yards of sheer fabric.

Vickerson has produced site-specific installations for various international exhibitions including the Istanbul Biennial as well as a project in the UK through Locus + titled “Fairytales and Factories”. She has exhibited extensively in Canada as well as the US, Britian, Turkey, Poland and China and has participated in several artist residencies including The Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff, Alberta) and the “Sympo-Fibres International” in Ste-Hyacinth, Quebec. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Canada Council for the Arts, Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and the Arts Council of England.