Aganetha Dyck working at her hive studio in 2011 (photo courtesy of Michael Gibson Gallery)
Reproduced with permission from Michael Gibson Gallery July 26, 2025 newsletter.
On my first business visit to Winnipeg, around 1997, I met artist Dominique Rey at the Plug In gallery. I was there to support the Border Crossings bi-annual fundraiser. After we toured downtown she asked me who I wanted to meet in Winnipeg. My immediate answer was Aganetha Dyck. A phone call was organized for Aganetha to call me at my hotel. I will always remember sitting starring at the phone before the old fashioned ring made me jump and before hearing her delicate voice for the first time.
She asked me where I was staying, to which I replied some poor, cheap place (I had a very low budget). She suggested that I move to the Fort Garry and that she would meet me there. I have stayed at the Fort Garry ever since.
When I arrived at the then Palm Lounge in the Fort Garry, I was greeted by quite a crowd, including Aganetha who sat with an open chair beside her. We quickly became close friends along with Diana Thorneycroft, her constant studio mate, who sat beside her. These kind of first meetings can be like a date, both wondering “will I like them”?
Aganetha was easy to like, as was her character. I do remember Diana’s shock when Aganetha ordered a scotch neat, Aganetha being mostly a tea totaler. I ordered the same in support of her decision. Things went well and I visited her third-floor staircase-only studio the next day.
All of my western trips that winter resulted in an exhibition at our gallery entitled West Of Wawa followed a couple years later with Summerpeg. Aganetha was presented with Gathie Falk, Wanda Koop, Diana Thorneycroft, Dorothy Knowles, Dominique Rey in those years.
We have always believed strongly in the importance of Aganetha’s artwork in Canadian art. A simple yes over a neat scotch lead to more than 20 years of a very meaningful relationship for MGG. Thank you, Aganetha, whose presence, warmth and spark will always remain with Jennie and me.
Michael Gibson
Aganetha Dyck was born in 1937 in Marquette, Manitoba. Raised in a Mennonite family and the eldest of four kids, Aganetha grew up on a farm where she learned first-hand about working collectively in a self-sufficient manner. At 20 she married Peter Dyck and became a mother to three children. In 1972 the family moved to Prince Albert where Aganetha took art courses and rented her first studio. It was here at the age of 35 where she began her journey as an artist, one of discovery, chance and constant innovation.
An accidental laundry episode led Aganetha to her first series of shrinking wool sweaters in an old agitator washing machine. With this unique method she could sculpt the wool, felting hundreds of sweaters, hats and gloves. For her, she was developing her own artistic language, one that she would follow for the rest of her career.
The Dyck family moved back to Winnipeg in 1976 and Aganetha leased a downtown studio, an old button factory. A $500 bank loan allowed Aganetha to purchase thousands and thousands of the remaining buttons. She had “found her paint” and proceeded to do what came naturally. After a failed attempt at baking the buttons, she canned the buttons transforming them into glistening, alluring sculptures that eventually became known as “The Large Cupboard.”
In the mid 1980s, there was a large anti-tobacco discussion in the Canadian press. Aganetha responded by posting signs offering to transform “the last cigarette” of anyone trying to quit smoking. For two years, she received cigarettes and transformed them before mailing them back to the original owners. By waxing, ornamenting and bejewelling, she altered each cigarette, transforming them from an ordinary object into extraordinary objects of art.
For the buttons and cigarette’s Aganetha was using paraffin wax, which one day ran out. She visited the Beekeeper’s co-op to instead purchase beeswax and saw above the office door a sign that read BEE MAID HONEY written in honeycomb, about four inches deep, created by the bees. She knew instantly that she had found her collaborators and, for the following 20 years, collaborated with live honeybees to create her artwork.
Working well ahead of her time, Aganetha developed an active studio practice interested in the power of the small and interspecies communication. From drawings to shoes, sports equipment, plastic flowers, purses, figurines, and a life-sized glass dress, Aganetha placed these interesting objects into beehives, allowing the bees to build honeycomb on the objects, sometimes over the course of years.
It is this sense of wonder, chance discovery and interest to constantly learn that forms Aganetha Dyck’s innovative body of artwork. Her artworks are simultaneously metaphysical, delicate and sometimes humorous. She shows us that the “exotic” can be found in the most mundane and everyday of things, if one examines them with an open mind. In one sense, she didn’t transform an object as much as she liberated objects from familiar contexts, thus imbuing them with greater meaning.
A recipient of countless awards and honours, Aganetha won the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts in 2007 and the Manitoba Arts Council Arts Award of Distinction in 2006. Her artwork is in many collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Britain.
A celebration for both Aganetha and Peter’s lives will take place on Thursday, Aug. 7 from 6 pm to 9 pm at Plug In ICA, 460 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, MB. More information can be found HERE. ■
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