1 of 5
Photo: Larry Glawson.
"Dive"
Sheila Butler, "Dive", 1984, serigraph, 20" x 13".
2 of 5
Photo: Larry Glawson.
"Poolside (In Back of the Real)"
Sheila Butler, "Poolside (In Back of the Real)", 1988, etching with aquatint, 24" x 21".
3 of 5
Photo: Larry Glawson.
"Pool"
Sheila Butler, "Pool", stencil monoprint, 26" x 20".
4 of 5
Photo: Larry Glawson.
"Swimmer"
Sheila Butler, "Swimmer", linocut, 26" x 18".
5 of 5
Photo: Larry Glawson.
"Tent"
Sheila Butler, "Tent", 1982, etching with aquatint, 9" x 12". Photo: Larry Glawson
SHEILA BUTLER
… on a continuous roll (part one)
Sept. 5 to Oct. 17, 2014
Martha Street Studio, Winnipeg
By Sarah Swan
When viewing the early prints of Sheila Butler, it’s easy to see her love for a swimmer’s choreography. Dive, for example, describes the fluid motion of figures moving through water. Legs are distorted into rippling shapes while arms are layered in greens, oranges and browns. The figures almost undulate, a feat given the relative flatness of silkscreen.
In the collection of prints that make up the first part of the former Winnipegger’s retrospective, there are pieces from many major bodies of work. Besides the early swimming figures, there are camping figures, bedroom figures, and a later series that uses a graphic-novel style of fragmented narrative. The retrospective’s second part, slated for the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba in early 2015, will focus on her paintings.
Butler, who now lives in Toronto, began maturing as an artist at the same time modernist abstraction was becoming dominant. Figurative work was well on its way into exile. In a 1985 interview with art critic Robert Enright, Butler said she had learned a great deal about the language of paint from abstract artists, but preferred to explore ideas related to the body. And, she had discovered early on that she didn’t want to describe specifics like clothing or furniture. The swimming theme afforded her every possibility. “You know,” she said at the time, “anything was believable in the water medium.”
Butler is also interested in what lies beyond choreography. Her work frequently mines the subconscious. The etching Nike, for instance, describes the winged goddess poised for takeoff. She is bold, wreathed in an aura of assertive lines. Behind her looms a second weightless head, suggesting another plane of awareness. In Tent, a primordial power takes the form of a red mask while a small figure stands in a triangle of light: A camper confronts his fear of wilderness. But the camper represents us as well, when we encounter the further, murky places of our own psyches.
It’s not a far reach to say Butler’s work from the 1970s has much in common with Canadian literary criticism of the same period. Like Margaret Atwood, she embraces the associations of archetypal myth. Water and wilderness refuse to act as singular symbols, instead becoming spacious metaphors. The middle swimmer in Dive wears a totem-like mask, suggesting pools are places where historical strata can merge with the present. And, as in Atwood’s poetry, something feels vaguely threatening. The boundaries between the conscious and subconscious mind seem dangerously thin.
Talking about her print-based work, Butler articulates this layered approach. “I feel that my pictures refer to memory and imagination, and also refer to something that I actually stood and looked at yesterday, all simultaneously pictorial.”
