The most fecund places are those that are neither/nor, and Dorothy Caldwell knows this. Life thrives along the edges – the littoral regions where sea meets land, or along the cleaving edge where forest meets open field, or even where pruned hedge might abut the suburban lawn. Her textile-based work is neither/nor, aesthetically mining those edgy regions where representational meets abstraction, where a focus on medium-specificity butts up against the persistent imperatives of the image. Caldwell's pieces may very well be classified somewhere by somebody as landscapes, but that don't necessarily make them so.
Dorothy Caldwell, Ancient Forest/Arctic Willow, 2013
Silent Ice/Deep Patience, which just opened at the Art Gallery of Peterborough (and which is set to start a major tour) brings together work Caldwell's done over the past few years, much of which has to do with research trips she's made up to the Canadian Arctic and down to the Australian Outback. Sure, look hard enough (or maybe not hard enough) and a landscape pops right out. In Survival/Spinflex, one of the smaller works in the show, X marks a spot as two paths cross one another in a spotty, blotched landscape marked by an ovoid ochre-red shape that makes all of this seem very Australian, and, yeah, even map-like. But muddy brown stains across the cotton surface hinting at abstraction and an intervening square patch of jarringly aquamarine stitching occlude the totality of a guide-book reading. There's no aesthetic absolutism, no map-like determinism here. We are given to see this piece otherly. You know: neither/nor.
Ancient Forest/Arctic Willow is another of the smaller pieces, and right off the bat the title speaks to the idea of landscape. Visually, though, it's another matter. Here we encounter the grid, but not a hyper-clean, geometrically precise Agnes Martin kind of grid. Caldwell's is delightfully and humanly untidy and imprecise; the lower half of the work is all fat verticals and horizontals (and a spot entirely devoid of the vertical), the upper half a much finer, denser weave. Into this, Caldwell's attached gridded cloth rectangles of different colours and sewn a horizontal band of five blotches of diagonally stitched threads, each a vibrant blaze of individual colour. Closer to the bottom, a line of green unevenly and entirely transits the work; near the top, it's a line of blue that rises to a peak before dropping off and leaving the visual plane. Boundaries of some kind? Maybe. Topographical inventions? Perhaps. Or, at a stretch, something suggestively akin to poet Louis Zukofsky's articulation of his poetics: "lower limit speech/upper limit music." In the space between, in the weave of Dorothy Caldwell's aesthetic, it's the world of neither/nor, one and the other.
Art Gallery of Peterborough: http://agp.on.ca/
Dorothy Caldwell: Silent Ice/Deep Patience continues until June 1.
Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, independent curator, and freelance art critic. He is the author of Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art, four books of poetry, and Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War. McElroy lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather. He is Akimblog's roving Ontario correspondent and can be followed @GilMcElroy on Twitter.
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Dorothy Caldwell at the Art Gallery of Peterborough
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