Gathie Falk: Apples, etc.

A new and surprisingly intimate memoir is chock full of anecdotes about one of Vancouver’s favourite artists. Apples are just one aspect of everyday life that Gathie Falk explored.

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Is it any wonder that lush red apples are almost synonymous with Gathie Falk, the Vancouver artist who finds the luminescent in the everyday minutiae of ordinary existence? Her fascination with the world around her – often rendered with a whimsical twist – reaches an apotheosis in her ceramic sculptures of the humble fruit, set in a pyramid like a grocer’s display. Even 14 Rotten Apples, pictured on the cover of Apples, etc.: An Artist's Memoir, are so darned glossy, candied really, that biblical admonitions about sin and temptation slip from consciousness. You simply experience embodied desire, the urge to touch them.

With this just-published collection of vignettes, Falk joins a fine lineage of Canadian artists, including Emily Carr and Doris McCarthy, who have written about themselves late in life. Such memoirs are fascinating not just for the histories they preserve – whether context about creative work or recollections of art scenes now past – but also for insights into the protagonist’s personality and psychology. Memoirs, often more personal and literary than autobiographies, though the categories do blur, flesh out the primary way we know artists: by looking at their work. They also expand the usual range of curatorial essays and critical reviews, allowing artists to emerge as fuller characters fraught with all the messy particularities of human existence. And while memoirs are necessarily one-sided, at their best, they are driven by a desire to share a sincere accounting.

Indeed, the memoir can be a deeply intimate form, whether inadvertently or by intent. In this regard, Apples, etc., written with Vancouver critic Robin Laurence, does not disappoint. It is surprisingly personal with short chapters about family, friends, various art projects and other happenings in Falk’s life. She writes about her impoverished childhood after the premature death of her father, who brought his Mennonite family to Canada from Russia, and the hard work and determined spirit that propelled her, from her birth in rural Manitoba in 1928, through early struggles to a fulfilling life of art and teaching.

Over the years, Falk has created many bodies of work in diverse media – performance, painting, sculpture and installation. Her first major success was a quirky 1968 installation, Home Environment, which brought together found objects and handmade ceramics. In the book, Falk writes about buying gallons of pink paint to transform an old armchair into a gleaming sculpture. She added ceramic objects – fish, a TV dinner, a plucked chicken that sat in a birdcage. The critics loved it and more shows followed. As Falk says: “I was launched.”

Falk acknowledges the popularity of her ceramic apples and recalls the initial impulse. “I had noticed a pyramid of apples at a corner grocer’s and knew immediately that I could make something very special out of that everyday arrangement – sculpture that was part organic form, part geometric structure,” she writes. “Apples became my new joy: throwing them on the wheel and then shaping them and piling them in pyramids – some of the pyramids with square bases and others rectangular – glazing them, and then firing them so that the glaze fused the apples together."

She segues into a story about the theft of two piles of fruit, one during an installation and the other, a damaged work, from her porch. Again and again, Falk’s stories move this way, winding together the profound and the pedestrian. It's particularly evident when she writes about her marriage, in her late 40s to a man some two decades younger: “I was surprised at my friends’ reaction when I told them I was going to be married. I was surprised, too, when my husband – before he reached that blessed state – asked me if he could have a car when he got out of jail.”

Identified in the memoir only as Dwight, he heard Falk on a radio program and wrote to her. They corresponded for a few months and, eventually, she visited him in the provincial penitentiary in New Westminster. After a few visits, they were engaged.

“People have repeatedly asked me why I would marry a career criminal and all I can say is that I loved him. He was handsome and charming and attentive. I didn’t know what his history was or would be. Agreeing to marry him was probably not a rational decision, but once I’d made it, I stuck to it stubbornly.”

The marriage broke down after eight months. Dwight went back to prison, and Falk used his car, an antique 1936 Ford Business Coupe with flames painted on its doors, in a show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, filling its interior with ceramic watermelons. “Fire is associated with warmth, danger, excitement and purification,” she writes. “With suffering, too. It is a certainty that, during my short marriage and its long aftermath, I went through fire.”

One curious aspect of memoirs is their ability to create the illusion of familiarity with someone you have never met or know only slightly. It’s a tricky gambit. In Apples, etc., published by Vancouver’s Figure 1, Falk comes across as warm and engaging, even if her voice is flatly matter of fact. But as I was reading, I had to negotiate memories of our one interview, years ago at an exhibition. I recall being fascinated by her dress. Some sort of fruity or floral print, it reminded me of her work and prompted me to muse why artists are drawn to particular aesthetics. New to arts writing at the time, I was reluctant to conflate Falk’s work with her outfit, or, for that matter, even mention it. In hindsight, given Falk’s creative interest in the mundane objects of ordinary life – whether shoes, poppies growing along a sidewalk or, yes, women’s dresses – it seems a less frivolous impulse.

And, indeed, Falk created a remarkable series of six papier-mâché frocks, including Dress with Insect Box, a 1998 work now in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It has a fascinating materiality. Crinkled and stiff, with a paint-and-varnish sheen, it invites careful study of the full skirt, the Mary Jane collar and other detailing. Vertical darts on the bodice lead the gaze to the slight swell of a woman’s breasts, the lone visual cue to an absent body. It looks more like a specimen than a garment, more police morgue than bedroom closet. The insect box, sitting on a small shelf cut and folded up from the skirt’s hem, nails that perception.

I love Falk’s apples, but her dresses are equally fine, a comment on female invisibility, certainly, but perhaps also a metaphorical parallel to the role of the artist. As I think of our brief encounter, and recall looking at her sitting, somewhat stiffly, in the centre of a gallery filled with her work, I feel an echo of that paper dress. There was a palpable space around Falk, but also a sense of surety. She seemed as much her own creation as the art.

What impulses and intuitions lead artists to remake the stuff of daily life, not simply to represent or preserve a tangible reality, but to evoke something greater through the suggestive powers of the materials they use? Apples, etc. answers some questions, but raises more. In truth, any piece of writing cannot capture the depth of a life. It always remains a lesser copy, merely gesturing at some greater reality.

That’s also the plight of art – and a key to its mysterious power. There’s something unsayable at the edge of Falk’s work, a quality that goes beyond beauty and fascinating surfaces, beyond subject, theme or any conceptual formulation. What is that? Where does it come from? Even a memoir of Proustian breadth cannot fully answer such questions. But as an accounting of a life? Apples, etc. offers insight into a remarkably creative and self-directed woman who enjoys friends, artistic exploration and both critical and commercial success, even moments of transcendence, but who has also coped with pain, sacrifice and hard, solitary work. Easily read, yet thought provoking, it is a welcome addition to the genre. ■

Read an excerpt from Apples, etc.  

Copyright 2018 by Gathie Falk. Text copyright 2018 by Robin Laurence. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Home Environment

In 1966, I began working on the ceramic sculptures and altered found objects that would be part of my breakthrough installation. It was first titled Living Room Environment, but I later changed it to Home Environment, which was more accurate and also more succinct. I may not have known it at the time, but I was making a three-dimensional still life, a work with many components, the major themes being furniture, food, clothing, and games.

On the last day of 1967, Doug Chrismas invited me to show in his gallery, a thrill and an honour since the Douglas Gallery was the most progressive exhibition space in Vancouver at the time. I had a couple of months to come up with an idea, and originally I thought of creating an attic setting. Then I realized that a number of the sculptures of household items I’d already made would fit into a living room environment. (“Environment” was what installation art was then called.) I’d altered some found furniture and made other pieces of furniture out of clay—very delicate. The owners of the nearest paint store didn’t know (and eventually could not believe) what I was doing with gallon after gallon of pink paint. I was transforming an ugly green 1950s armchair into a hard, glossy sculpture. I had discovered that by repeatedly soaking fabric—either upholstery fabric or clothing—in undercoat and then covering it with enamel paint, I could mimic the appearance of glazed ceramic, which helped marry the found objects with the objects I was sculpting. The handmade ceramic pieces included a checkerboard with alternating pink-flocked and brown-glazed squares and an orange and a woman’s shoe on top, another game board with a sandwich on top, a plucked and eviscerated chicken that sat in a birdcage, a frozen tv dinner, a pair of women’s shoes encased in resin, a “canvas” side chair with a man’s tie draped over it, and folded men’s suit jackets mounted in a Plexiglas case.

I screen-printed wallpaper with repeated images of food on plates, including a main course of a chicken drumstick, mashed potatoes, and peas, and a dessert of pie and ice cream. One armchair ended up with flocking all over it. Flocking is the fuzzy stuff you used to see on old-fashioned Christmas cards, and I had found a great source of it in a decorating store located in a back alley downtown. Apart from a bright red sideboard, which I later incorporated into a performance piece, most of the objects in the show were covered with glaze, paint, and/or flocking in grey and light peachy pink. I placed two iridescent grey ceramic fish on the arms of the big pink chair.

The Douglas Gallery was big, but I managed to fill it. The show was titled Living Room, Environmental Sculpture and Prints, and the opening reception was spectacular. I wore a peachy-pink dress that I’d made for the occasion. The gallery was jammed with visitors, so many that they ended up spilling out onto the Davie Street sidewalk. Both of the daily papers covered the show, as did the national arts magazine artscanada, and I was interviewed on CBC Radio. The writers who turned out—Ann Rosenberg, Joan Lowndes, Richard Simmons, and Marguerite Pinney—all enthused about it. And although I didn’t make any money from the show (at the time, I sold only one item, a ceramic sculpture of a package of ground beef tied with a string, to an American tourist), my installation was a huge professional success. Critics and curators loved it. I was invited to stage a version of it at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California, and invitations for other shows and commissions quickly followed.

I was launched.

***

Before I altered the big old armchair, I sat in it and thought, “Hmm, if I put fish here, on the arms, and mount a man’s coat above the back, like a canopy, that would create a feeling of a throne, perhaps. It would suggest a king or a father.” It wasn’t my intention to evoke my own father, but that is what critics saw in the chair and in the installation itself. Darkness, absurdity, grotesquerie, and the ghost of my dead father.

Apples, etc.: An Artist's Memoir, Gathie Falk with Robin Laurence, Figure 1 (Vancouver / Berkeley) $22.95.

Gathie Falk's show, The Things We Grow, is on view at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver from May 26 to June 30, 2018.