Alice Crawley by Niagara Artists Centre

© 2006 Niagara Artists’ Centre Niagara Artists’ Centre 354 St. Paul Street St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2R 3N2 Catalogue commemorating retrospective exhibitions held at Niagara Artists’ Centre, Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Grimsby Public Art Gallery, and Durham Art Gallery ISBN 0-9732509-3-3 Essay by Carolyn Wren Text in English Book Design by Stephen Remus Graphic Design by Natasha Pedros with Kyle Bishop Photography by Judy Bowyer and Stephen Remus, unless otherwise noted. Printed in an edition of 1000 by Peninsula Press, St. Catharines Bound and finished by Van Huizen Bookbinding and Finishing Ltd., St. Catharines

Riddle Me This, Alice... Stephen Remus

Alice says she doesn’t know why but some nights she closes her eyes and the honeycomb pattern materializes. She says this as we’re sitting in Tobey and Carolyn’s backyard on a warm soupy summer evening talking about the art she’s devoted some sixty years of her life to making — particularly, about a piece she made in the late 1990s, a large back-lit box of hand-sewn silk sculpted into a network of honeycomb. The conversation is metered by our long questions and Alice’s short answers. If this was an exercise in journalism — and it thankfully wasn’t — things would not be going easily. Alice epitomizes the intuitive artist. Her motivations are inscrutable, mysterious and she carries no maps or accompanying analytic tableaux to decipher the curious objects that are her creative legacy. A typical response to an enquiry about her work — one too familiar to my ears — is the thoughtfully considered, “I don’t know, what do you think?” Comparatively, then, Alice’s disclosure of conjuring honeycombs approaches some actual insight from the artist into her creative method, but, of course, not one that will

guide us nearer her motives. It’s only after you resign yourself to not knowing Alice’s intentions that you realize it’s the conspicuous absence of calculated purposes that makes her work irresistible. Alice coaxes you into the riddle with her. It was a high time putting Alice’s retrospective together. Thanks to all the partners and the many volunteers who contributed to making both the exhibitions and this publication happen, especially Carolyn Wren and Tobey C. Anderson, who worked selflessly so that Alice’s unique vision could be shared.

- Stephen Remus, director Niagara Artists’ Centre St. Catharines, 2006

Where is Everybody? Tobey C. Anderson

It wasn’t until I started working at the Niagara Artists’ Centre as director that I got to know Alice personally and learned of her influence and role in the St. Catharines community. Alice used to gallery sit as a volunteer on Saturdays, giving me the opportunity to learn about her work and history at NAC. As I familiarized myself with the archives, it became immediately apparent that Alice was a key founding figure in the organization. From the beginning of our relationship, she began teaching me things that brought more depth to my own experience and art practice, as well as how things worked in the St. Catharines art scene. Alice was also — literally — the first to arrive at openings and events, and usually among the last to leave. On walking into the empty gallery she would announce her presence to me by saying: “Where is everybody!?” This happened like clockwork at every event, and I came to count on Alice to anchor the evenings with her wit and direct open dialogue about art, as past NAC directors must have for the two preceding decades.

The longer I knew Alice, the more she warmed up to me — though Alice was not reserved in expressing her well-grounded criticisms of the male-dominated art world she had experienced. I consider myself lucky to have been accepted, first as a colleague and then a friend, and to have earned her respect — just how, I don’t know. She is a woman of simple yet sophisticated tastes, opinions, and views. She has influenced and taught me without trying or without realizing it. Alice has no idea, really, of just how inspiring and influential she has been. Even though Alice chooses to be oblivious to so-called high art dialogue and the volumes of art theory out there, she is guided by her muse — intuitively. She patiently waits for her ideas to come to her, finding what ignites her imagination: a pigeon skeleton, dried root, honeycomb, or bird’s egg. Her love of antiques and puzzles collides in her hands: weaving with wires, casting nature in bronze, and carving forms with an unconventional use of tools. She relentlessly pursues her vision to solve the

riddles before her, improvising to unfold and realize her mysterious art pieces. Her early experiences in theatre have been woven into the tapestry of her art and presentation of her sculptures. Alice is the most demanding artist I have ever worked with during installations, especially lighting. She introduced me to black theatre foil, used to create the right illumination and ambience for the gallery and each piece. She always pushed the limits of the grid, fixtures, and bulbs — not to say my patience — but in the end the installations were remarkably stunning and beautiful. Her critical eye has guided me in new curatorial and installation directions. The drama of her work in situ has created a legacy of rethinking gallery form and function at NAC, where this aspect of her vision was best represented in her retrospective exhibits.

resting on a bed of stream pebbles. It had come full circle. It now rests on my mantle to remind me of the magic of art, fishing, and Alice.

- Tobey C. Anderson St. Catharines, 2006

A few years ago, I stopped by Alice’s on the way home from fishing the Beaver River to rest, visit, and give her a nice rainbow trout I had caught earlier in the day. This was the first rainbow she had seen up close and handled, and she was very impressed with its size, colour, form, and taste. A few months later, on the occasion of another visit to Alice in Durham, she produced a rainbow trout she had carved from memory out of a scrap piece of pine using dull kitchen knives, painted with watercolours, and

The Strength of Alice Crawley John B. Boyle

When I first met Alice Crawley in the late 1960’s, she was an early middle-aged family woman who worked as the librarian at the St. Catharines Standard newspaper. She appeared to be giving up on painting and was experimenting with three dimensional works and amazing woven-wire wall pieces. Her house was filled with unique unfinished antique pieces of furniture, weatherworn architectural cornices and ornaments from old buildings, farm implements, fine old pots, and the like. An enormous hand loom completely filled her living room just inside the front entrance hall. Entering her house was like visiting the inner workings of her brain.

impervious to the barbs of critics or the pressures of the established art world to follow the trends. She seemed always to listen only to her inner voice, to follow her creative imperative, to get the new work done no matter what. She was deadly serious about her work, but never suppressed her wonderful sense of humour. I laughed out loud when I saw her tiny copulating saw horses in a NAC erotic miniature show. I was amazed by her show of segments of farm outbuildings. Her bronze birds’ nests, wheat sheaves, and whole trees took my breath away. Her life-like/ death-like old Niagara tombstone sculptures were shocking in their cold beauty and unadulterated truthfulness.

Alice was one of a handful of women in the vibrant and energetic group of artists who formed the Niagara Artists’ Company. She was and is a true artist of enormous strength and resourcefulness with a fecund imagination.

- John B. Boyle, founding president of NAC Peterborough, 2006

Her work was powerful and original, always surprising and in a constant state of flux. She was

Every Second Counts Gordon Hatt

This survey exhibition of sixty years of Alice Crawley’s amazingly productive life as an artist brought to me intensely personal reminders of the passage of time and the cycle of life. As a relative newcomer to St. Catharines and the Niagara Region, I was introduced to Alice Crawley through the Niagara Artists’ Company — primarily by Carolyn Wren, Tobey Anderson and Stephen Remus. But I was also introduced to Alice through another source: Marlene Markle and Tony Massett at the Durham Art Gallery. The Durham Art Gallery, a co-organizer of this exhibition, was also my first employer as a curator — my first “job” as it were — and from that connection, I experienced the powerful sensation of being on the outside edge of a slowly turning wheel, of returning to places and sensibilities that were, and remain, significant influences in my life. With all the fanfare of the title of the exhibition (does it cover fifty, or is it sixty years of art making?) it occurred to me that Alice’s work, really has nothing to do with time at all. Her work seems to me, “timeless,” in the sense that each of her pieces

somehow stands individually, outside of time. Each piece is the result of Alice’s direct engagement of the world of ideas, of matter, of spirit. There is nothing here that is sequential, or progressive, or linear in this body of work. Alice and her work, are all about curiosity and its embrace in the eternal now. I want to thank the people at the Niagara Artists’ Company and at the Durham Art Gallery for making this very special exhibition happen. I want to thank them for letting Rodman Hall Arts Centre be a part of it. And I want to thank them for making it possible for me to hang out and drink beer with Alice Crawley for a week.

- Gordon Hatt, director/curator Rodman Hall Art Centre St. Catharines, 2006

Alice in Grimsby Rhona Wenger

An undeniable force in the Niagara arts community, Alice Crawley’s work defies attempts to define and categorize. Crawley has created a series of powerfully stated ideas about, and interactions with, the world around her. Her strength of purpose and power of expression earned her the respect and admiration first of the Niagara arts community centered in St. Catharines, and eventually of a broader community, but (as those of us ‘in the know’ always say about the uninitiated) never the general level of respect that her undeniable talent deserved. But maybe Crawley just happens to like it that way. The community around St. Catharines that she lived and worked within for so many years was always extremely important to her; she established a literary journal; designed sets for the Shaw Festival; was a founding member of one of Canada’s first artist-run centres — all activities that demand huge commitment and offer minimal material return. Many of the themes explored in her artwork reflect this relationship with her community.

The place where human and natural worlds intersect is significant. Crawley was included in a major exhibition at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery in 1991, Out Of Respect For The Land. This display explored human interactions with the fragile ecosystem of the Niagara Escarpment. For this exhibition, Crawley created a bronze fruit tree, its branches heavily laden with a crop of small bronze houses. This was her comment on the relentless development that was at the time transforming the regional landscape. In his catalogue essay fellow artist Reinhard Reitzenstein described the piece as “…a direct iconic hybrid of the dilemma facing the fruitlands in the Niagara region.” The piece is as relevant today when the pace of development has, if anything, accelerated, as it was fifteen years ago. Much of the gutsy perfection of Crawley’s work comes from her ability to merge ideas and materials into ‘iconic hybrids’: the Newspaper Column, the wire Sweater, the birds’ nests cast in bronze. Each of these pieces creates a dynamic visceral response; a spark of recognition that jolts the viewer’s awareness through

the artist’s deliberate choice of material coupled with clarity of presentation. As John Boyle has so rightly pointed out, Crawley tackles the big-ticket themes — life, birth, death — in her work, but she does this with precision, intelligence and a wicked sense of humour that together launch her vision well into the realm of extraordinary.

Rhona Wenger, director Grimsby Art Gallery Grimsby, 2006

Alice Carolyn Wren

Alice Crawley’s art floats in a darkened gallery, suspended in the viewer’s mind, like the image of Ophelia. At her retrospective installation at the Niagara Artists’ Centre, Crawley suspends an old Burleigh Falls cedar strip canoe; it hovers only a few inches from the ground. Spotlit on the floor beside the canoe, a simply carved trout appears to ply the imaginary water. The installation resonates sending thoughts about life and death rippling through your mind. A concurrent installation at Rodman Hall is part of the same oeuvre. Although Rodman’s installation seems drastically different at first, the continuity is remarkable. Here, the white-walled gallery space houses traditional and non-traditional sculptures. A bronze tree, a column of newspaper, and a knitted wire sweater draw the attention of onlookers closer and then softly whisper in their ears. Crawley’s work never shouts; through materials and metaphors, her work alludes to things unspeakable yet is quietly understood. The sixty years of Alice Crawley’s art making has been forceful, indelible, and an

incredible influence on the Niagara community of artists. At ninety, Alice Crawley is a matriarch in Niagara’s visual arts community. She was born in 1915 to May and Herman Finnie of Peterborough, Ontario, and moved to St. Catharines when she was just one year old. At three, in her downtown home across from Montebello Park, Alice made what she called linoleum tile patterns from the cardboard that divided a box of shredded wheat. Her high school education at the St. Catharines Collegiate was without art classes. At the height of the Depression, Alice’s father helped her get her first job as a stenographer at the zipper manufacturer, Lightning Fastener. Being a woman, she was expected to leave a decade later when she got married to Albert Crawley in 1941. While Albert was stationed in Nova Scotia during the war, Alice remained in St. Catharines and raised their four children, taking up painting as a hobby as they were growing up. It wasn’t until after her last child

was eight that she decided to take a painting class from David Partridge, well-known Niagara artist and teacher. Partridge’s “steady effort to raise nonprofessional painting standards” (The St. Catharines Standard, Wednesday 2 May 1956) certainly had a huge influence on Alice’s drive to change her hobby into something far more serious.

rectangles within rectangles to create this clever composition. In the painting Orchard, Crawley abandons any attempts at realism to use form and colour in her own version of cubism. With sharply defined areas of colour, she creates a figure-ground ambiguity, blending branches, leaves and sky into fragments of subdued tones in browns and blues.

Crawley’s art career began in the fifties when she first entered juried shows across Ontario and Quebec. Although there were few opportunities for emerging artists, she was in good company, exhibiting in these shows with Alex Colville, Ed Hughes, Mary Prittie, Tom Hodgson, Ivan Eyre, William Cyopik, Duncan deKergommeaux, and Andre Beiler.

During this time Crawley volunteered in local theatre, acting and painting sets. She was involved in the first Shaw Festival performance, Canaday. For this play, she borrowed flats from Niagara Community Theatre and painted them in the basement at Rodman Hall. Her contribution to the arts was extensive and crossed all disciplines.

As a gifted painter, Crawley worked within the conventional genres of Canadian art. She carefully modelled the subject matter with a muted palette. She broke down the forms into simplified abstractions, such as in the work of Marian Scott and Paraskeva Clark. In a small early piece called Cellar Doorway, she paints a quiet architectural picture with rhythmical brushstrokes describing a stone wall in the immediate foreground. A darkened doorway is the focus of the painting that leads the eye into a hall with a staircase. The open red door and transom are outlined in blue, highlighting the passage into another space. Crawley uses a series of

With the dissolution of her marriage in 1961, Crawley took a full time job as a librarian at The St. Catharines Standard to support herself and her four children: John, Sydney, Kent, and Harriet (endearingly known as Sam). Although much of her time was devoted to her family and her full-time job, she continued to enter juried exhibitions in the sixties and was accepted alongside Ron Martin, Tony Urquhart, Hugh Mackenzie, John Boyle, Greg Curnoe, and Murray Favro. Then in 1966-67, Crawley was invited to exhibit in smaller public gallery group shows. Her medium of the sixties was collage rather than painting.

Cellar Door, circa 1950. Oil on board. Collection of Peggy Armstrong.

She manipulated the materials, building layer-by-layer paint, ink, and paper until she revealed a dynamic abstraction, not unlike her Toronto contemporaries the Painters Eleven. Her unique vision was subtle and often understated against the loud colours and bold forms of other regionalists like Curnoe, Boyle, and Tourbin. Crawley’s collages were quiet experiments in colour and line, and they exposed the process. In her later works, process would become even more important. It really wasn’t until 1970, with the formation of Niagara Artists’ Centre, one of Canada’s first artist-run collectives, when Crawley’s art began to take flight. Crawley’s involvement in NAC was instrumental to her art making. She was involved in countless artist-initiated projects and exhibitions. Being a woman made this venture somewhat difficult, but Crawley’s perseverance ensured her feminist influence on the collective’s operation. Because of her late start at a serious art career and the fact that she was a woman, Crawley was burdened with the stigma of a Sunday painter in the eyes of many of the young male artists at NAC. Crawley was headed for the difficulty of collaborating and defying the historic views of the traditional male artists. In fact, she worked hard to align herself with other female artists in Niagara to

permeate the collective with a balanced female point of view. Although all women were excluded from the planning meetings at the local Lancer Restaurant, Alice worked hard to keep informed and to keep other women informed about the future projects of the collective. Despite these difficulties, Crawley was inspired and challenged by the artists. Continuing to work as a female artist became easier as her male counterparts slowly began to accept the women as equals within the collective. Although Crawley’s work never took on overt feminist ideals, she continuously worked on an intuitive level, drawing inspiration from her immediate surroundings and her experiences. For the 1972 Niagara Now exhibition at Rodman Hall Arts Centre and in the streets of St. Catharines, Crawley began using wire as a medium to create wall hangings. She worked with the established idea of macramé woven wall art and twisted it into delicate architectural renderings. Hovering in the liminal space between drawing and sculpture, Crawley’s individual take on the medium was unconventional. She manipulated masculine materials to play with formal problems of positive and negative forms using simple shapes with her traditional feminine weaving. That Crawley was working in the midst of a male-dominated environment only seems to underline the poignancy of her practice at this time.

She used the situation to make something positive for herself and her female colleagues. In 1970, she took on the position of editor of the Twelve Mile Creek magazine. This artistic and literary magazine originating in Niagara published and disseminated work of many artists and writers in the area. In Crawley’s own words, from the eighth Edition, “[The Twelve Mile Creek] allow[s] me to marry all my loves at once and bring them together under one roof – art, the written word, photography, humour, poetry, and theatre.” Editing was no easy feat, yet Crawley’s high standards and discriminating eye created an art magazine like no other. With this active role in the community, Crawley was elected treasurer of the Niagara Artists’ Centre in 1975. The new position as a member of the executive ensured a voice for her thoughts and opinions on behalf of the female artists in the area. The 1978 Johnny Canuck Canadian Ego Exhibitionist “Dirty Show” exhibited throughout Ontario. This sequel to the 1972 Johnny Canuck Canadian Ego Exposition “Miniature Show” addressed pornography and erotica in art. Most of the contributions to this exhibition were derivative and direct appropriations of pornographic magazines. Crawley’s contributions to the project were sophisticated; in one 10 x 10 x 10 cm cube she reconstructed two

diminutive saw horses, one mounting the other; in another cube, a delicately woven wire penis. Although these sculptures were created in miniature, they have monumental significance. The leap from appropriations of pornography to suggestions of erotica raises the questions of the female response to such issues. Crawley pushed the idea of sexuality and sensuality outside the human experience. The inanimate saw horses with their human connotations are playful rather than crude. The filigreed phallus balances the positive and negative. In all cases, she uses a masculine material in uncommonly feminine ways. Crawley at this point in her career was well on her way to the work she still produces today. After she retired from her full-time job at The St. Catharines Standard, in 1981, she enrolled in a course at the Dundas Valley School of Art. Her instructor there, An Whitlock, continued to validate and to encourage her in the direction of sculpture using non-traditional mediums. Whitlock challenged Crawley to transform everyday objects into art. It resulted in a black leather glove stuffed and slightly altered into the shape of an elephant complete with ears. A Plexiglas box is filled with cubes made out of stiffened thread, in which ball bearings are placed. Tilted like a children’s game, the cubes tumble in a staccato pattern. The slightest alteration of a

Wire Penis, 1978.

Johnny Canuck Canadian Ego Exhibitionist.

Horsing Around, 1978.

Johnny Canuck Canadian Ego Exhibitionist.

readymade and an obvious reference to art history transforms found objects into art. Crawley often refers to Whitlock as a mentor whose insight and inspiration changed her way of making art.

Untitled, 1984. From the Flight series.

Egg, 1986. Plaster, hay, cloth netting.

Throughout the eighties and into the nineties, Crawley simplified her ideas more. With each exhibition, Crawley explored (and continues to explore) the subject matter from the literal to the very abstract. However, her true exploration is not in the subject but in the material. In 1982 and 1983, Crawley produced a suite of work from latex rubber and twigs. With these abstract sculptures, Crawley further discovered process through the material. Letting go of the representational world, she juxtaposed both organic and geometric shapes to create sculptures. Crawley plays with and distorts ideas of rigid geometry by creating grids out of flimsy skin-like material. Like other women artists using latex, such as Eva Hesse, the attraction to an industrial material that takes on connotations of the body was very alluring to Crawley. In one of the surviving pieces, Crawley painted strips of red latex onto glass. After peeling the rubber off the glass, she used the latex to adhere small twigs to the base, the result a 90 cm shamanistic wall hanging. Unfortunately, the rest of the work deteriorated.

These abstract works led Crawley to create her Flight series, which was first exhibited at Rodman Hall in February 1984. She built large sculptures from latex rubber and wood, not unlike the models of da Vinci flying machines; she lit them from behind and suspended them from the ceiling. Here, Crawley contemplates notions of freedom through creativity and invention. Ethereal, yet well-constructed, these works are not fashioned after working machines, for they have nothing to do with aerodynamics; they are intuitively constructed and are her flights of fancy. Like her other latex sculptures, these pieces proved to be highly unstable and quickly fell apart by July of that same year. Undaunted, Crawley turned again to unusual materials in a 1986 exhibit she entitled Foundlings. Using the medium to inform the concepts of the show, Crawley dealt with a longing for home. She never attempts to solve or comfort the viewer; she only presents these ideas through her imagery. Crawley claims that she gave a home to objects she found and made them into art. A found maquette of a two-storey house-frame rests on a bed of straw; it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t protect, but it exposes the interior. A series of eight cotton mattresses were rolled and put away on two shelves, creating rows of soft spirals. A large egg, almost a metre in size, made of plaster and resting on a bed of straw is housed in a rectangle of

diaphanous mosquito netting made for a cot. Light becomes a new medium for Crawley in this show, introducing drama in the gallery. This drama intensified in her New Columns exhibit at NAC in 1989. It featured a number of columns made from materials ranging from paper to wire, and were spotlit in a darkened gallery. Crawley’s Wire Column, which was actually exhibited for the first time at a group show in Ottawa, is one of the strongest pieces of her oeuvre. A column, delicately and intricately woven out of several different gauges of wire, is broken into four large pieces which lie at odd angles to each other. The skeletal structure brings notions of architecture and material to the forefront, reminiscent of ancient ruins Crawley saw while in Italy in 1984. Although the column is in pieces, it still retains its graceful dignity. In fact, it is a reminder of the dichotomy between the permanence and fragility of the built structures that surround us. It hints at an archeological dig in which the entire story is never told, only inferred. The other columns in the show carry more visual weight. Contrasting the seriousness of architecture, Crawley’s humour is built into the fabric of the work. The 180 cm high column is made out of 45 cm diameter circles of torn newspaper. Crawley’s pun on “newspaper column” becomes a serious piece

with textural mass. Her Potato Column is made of plaster cast potatoes painted to look like the real thing and placed within a Plexiglas cylinder. The everyday arrangement of assembled potatoes takes on new meaning when raised on a pedestal and dramatically lit. This entire exhibition presents ideas of columns and structure in inventive, intimate, and vulnerable ways. Crawley bridges the gap between nature and culture with her two solo shows About Birds Nests and More Birds. She takes a leap in subject matter as her dream of moving into the country becomes closer to reality. Intrigued with the found objects in her previous work and antiques in her home, Crawley begins to assemble remnants of old architecture with birds’ nests she casts in bronze. Local foundry owner Bill Jurgenson nurtured her new interest in bronze casting. The juxtaposition of rustic and weathered pieces of architecture with the once-delicate bird’s nest, now made out of the traditional permanent material suggests the power of nature over society. Out of Respect for the Land was a group show at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery in the spring of 1991. Her only piece, entitled Violated, was a leafless fruit tree cast in bronze on which she hung small houses. Since the 1970s, Crawley has watched urban sprawl

Potato Column, 1989. Plaster, paint, Plexiglas, steel.

wipe out farmland and cover Niagara’s fertile soil with new subdivisions. Instead of fruit, Crawley’s tree bears bronze houses. The work of casting a tree was not a simple process, but Crawley was up for the challenge at the age of seventy-six. Twenty-seven separate casting were poured to complete the tree. Local bronze sculptor, Reinhard Reitzenstein credits Crawley in developing new and unconventional techniques in casting that pushed the limits of what could be done in bronze. Her zeal about art-making coupled with her passion about the subject gave her the energy and determination to complete the six month task.

Dovecote, 1992.

One year later, in 1992, after a one-month trip to France’s Loire Valley, Crawley mounted a show at Rodman Hall called Pastorale. By this time, she had purchased a twenty hectare lot in the Bruce County east of Durham, on a branch of the Saugeen River. Her dream of country living was becoming a reality. During her trip to France, she visited a Troglodyte village; these underground cave dwellings excavated from soft chalky rock in the Saumur region sustained her longings for a rural lifestyle. In particular, a dovecote carved out of the rock brought to mind her birds at home. Her Dovecote is constructed of Styrofoam, plaster, wire, wood, and paint. The 50 cm high model rests on a pedestal, waiting for the viewer to look in. Inside

sits one small carved dove. Crawley’s detailing in her model-making is seen in her construction of the cave, woven wire, fabricated hinges, sticking, and painting. Like Charles Simmonds’ work of the 1970s, the Dovecote does not necessarily reflect the realm of the real world, but the fictive. Like a dollhouse, the tableau that Crawley creates is in perfect stasis; it becomes a stage upon which the viewer imagines a series of actions. Her experience as a set painter and her love of the theatre comes to play in the Dovecote. As part of Pastorale, Crawley also made a series of small canvas boxes. In each untitled piece, Crawley fashioned boxes out of canvas, adding padding to make the canvas stiff enough to stand. Each box has a window covered with wire, hand-woven in small hexagons to resemble chicken wire. Inside the window of each box, something unexpected is celebrated. In one is a dried root, in a second there are three bird eggs, and in a third Crawley places dried seedpods. Again, Crawley uses the hallmarks of theatre to uphold and revere these found objects. In 1995, Crawley was included in an exhibition at Niagara Artists’ Company entitled Women and Medicine. The premise of the show was to bring together women artists and their ideas of medical science. Exhibiting beside Catherine Heard,

In 1999, Crawley returned to work with wire in her solo show at Uptown Studios in downtown St. Catharines. A small wire woven shirt sits on a pedestal intimate and reflective, compels and engages the viewer. As Julia Blushak writes in Pulse Magazine, May 1999, “this sweater hovers bereft, floating on its slim armature. This piece is a perfect note in a long career that has sought to liberate art as being of this earth rather than of a few worldly ideas.” Crawley’s two-venue retrospective at Rodman Hall and NAC is a crucial and fitting reflection on the formidable chapters of her career. The canoe that she refurbished and refinished is part of a healing process over the death of her youngest daughter, Sam. The canoe was purchased, carried to her home

and dragged into the woods where Sam’s ashes lie. Like Jackie’s Winsor’s Nailpiece, where Winsor hammers fifty pounds of nails into a stack of nine 2.5 x 20 cm boards to index a memory of her father, Crawley used this found object to work through and record her life and memory. And it feels like that in the show. It floats beside a roughly carved rainbow trout in the imagined water, dream-like, otherworldly, and it tells a discreet story of a life and the void. Alice Crawley has had a colossal impact on the artistic community in the region of Niagara. Her story is epic. Her art, monumental. Her life, heroic. Yet, in her quiet way, Crawley chooses to follow her Muse into the woods outside of Durham, Ontario, to create and to contemplate. At ninety, she is working on the next chapter of her story.

photo by Brian Yungblut

Rebecca Baird, Alison Brannen, Julie Aubin, and Jaclyn Shoub, Crawley’s pieces commemorate the women who died in childbirth in Upper Canada in the 1800s. Using the same materials she used in Dovecote, she carefully crafted four tombstones. The names, dates, and images are barely legible, alluding that the unrecognized are the quotidian. The tombstones quietly tell a story of feminist issues. This reflects on Crawley’s own accomplishments in the broader world as daughter, mother, librarian, and, most importantly, artist.

Carolyn Wren St. Catharines, 2006 Alice Crawley Rodman Hall September 2005

Thorold, 1954. Oil on board.

Orchard, circa 1955. Oil on canvas.

Embankment, circa 1955. Ink and mixed media.

Untitled, 1963. Mixed media collage.

Seagull, 1988. Chicken wire, plaster bandages, paint. 210 cm high 20

Small Bronze Tree, 2004. Bronze. 130 cm high

Violated, 1991. Bronze tree with bronze houses. 185 cm high 21

Bronze Jack on Found Column, 1989. Bronze, wood. 86 cm high

Wire Column, 1989. Wire, lead. Canvas: 152 x 457 cm

Ceramic Box Column, circa 1980 Ceramic, paint. 60 cm high

Cotton Column, 1989. Cotton. 420 cm high

Newspaper Column, 1989. Newspaper, metal rod. 183 cm high, diameter 45 cm 23

Wire Wall Hanging, 1972. Wire. 48 x 80 cm

Self Portrait, 1985. Wood, wire. life size 24

Sweater, 1985. Wire. 41 x 41 x 15 cm

Ragged Raven, 1990. Lead, wood. life size 25

Honeycomb, 2005. Silk, Varathane, wood, glass, light box. 78 x 78 x 46 cm

Honeycomb, detail.

Canvas Door, 1999. Canvas, cotton stuffing, gold leaf. 86 x 168 x 8 cm

Lead Door, 1999. Lead. 7 x 18 cm

Three Tombstones, 1994-1995. Mixed media. life size

Rainbow Trout, 1999. Wood, watercolour. 46 cm in length

SAM, Burleigh Falls Canoe with Rainbow Trout, 2001. Found object restored by Alice Crawley.

Trampoline, 1981. Mixed media. 45 cm high

Bronze Honeycomb, 1989-1991. Bronze. 12 x 12 cm

Wooden Crate with Eggs, 1992. Bronze, wood, paper egg cartons. life size

Elephant, 1970. Altered leather glove. life size

Wire Box with Quail Eggs, 1990. Mixed media. 10 x 23 cm

Oriole Nest, circa 1990. Bronze. life size

Canvas Box with Found Miniature Tree, 1988. Mixed media. 18 x 14 x 9 cm

Canvas Box with Quail Eggs, 1990. Mixed media. 24 x 11 x 9 cm

Canvas Box with Seed Pod, 1987. Mixed media. 18 x 20 x 9 cm

Caged, 1990. Steel, wire, lead, bird skeleton. 137 cm high

Bronze Basket and Fish, 1992. Bronze, silk, sand, paint. life size

Pediment and Bronze Nest, 1991. Found object, bronze, mixed media. life size

Downspout, 1990. Found object, bronze, mixed media. life size

Optical Allusions: Seeing Alice for Alice Crawley, 17/9/05

What a wonder Alice is! She has me in knots & stitches Her sculptures to behold with glee at Rodman Hall gets me blather on & babble at couple hapless gallery-goers who nod & anxious smile She has the poet without word, sans le mot juste for just exactly what her work does Transform? Alice does not “trans” the “form” of her given subjects out of nature: birds, their eggs & nests, trees from twigs to roots, honeycomb & fishes Not so shape-changed are her favourite artefacts found & retro-fit: columns, lintels, doors, cages, gravemarkers, crates, canoes, socks & sweaters 36

“Substance” it is Alice changes the stuff of things, their fabric that she messes with What a joker Alice is! Comical & magic, she surprises From exhibit’s entrance first bending closer look at wood boxes turns out are in fact ceramic, I get it that it is a closer look she makes me take When a stroll-thru seque in exhibition sequence goes 3 bronze eggs in flat, grey farmers’ market paper cartons next to oriole’s fragile nest still on branch & bronzed, I draw blank at best word for her playful twists on things, these puns manifest in 3-D She fools about with scale, too makes grander much than life an XXXXXL seagull, one great ginormous egg under cheesecloth nested & giant upon pedestal king of all the jacks renders as well miniatures: cages size of sugar-cubes a troglodytic dove-cote little boxes, itty-bitty socks

What a poet Alice is! She has me by the metaphor: A pillar of newsprint, circles of paper stacked taller than a person is, is her “Newspaper Column” Laughing out loud in sedate main gallery of Rodman Hall, knee-slapping helpless I lurch to next exhibit, stumble on to needed phrase for what it is that Alice does: “optical allusions,” changes wrought in fabric that show how like this is that Alice, she “transmogrifies”! About a week before this epiphany at Rodman Hall, by serendip I happen on Alice at the newest incarnation of the NAC Amidst installation chaos for this fifty-plus-year retrospective, I am blessed by her escort: a guided tour & commentary thru the paintings I had never even known about:

still life watercolours city streets & orchards, portraits, horses, Thorold, grasses & coach-houses, a setting of trombone clarinet & fiddle that for 1950 novice won prize judged by AY Jackson along from 2 to 3 dimensions, abstracts to untitled collages, to sweaters knit in wire, in fold of glove an elephant, tombstones out of styrofoam, as reclaimed centrepiece a gleaming Metis cedarstrip What a treasure Alice is her glories all about us If you wonder how they fit, if, too, they transmogrify I suggest you go ask Alice, I think she’ll know

- Terrance Cox St. Catharines, 2005

ALICE CRAWLEY

Born in 1915 in Peterborough, Ontario Lived and worked in St. Catharines, Ontario until 1994 Lives near Durham, Ontario Primarily self-taught, Crawley painted until 1980 when she turned to sculpture SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2006

SIXTY YEARS OF ART MAKING Grimsby Public Art Gallery

2005

FIFTY SIXTY YEARS OF ART MAKING Niagara Artists’ Centre FIFTY YEARS OF ART MAKING Rodman Hall ALICE CRAWLEY: A RETROSPECTIVE Durham Art Gallery

1999

Uptown Studios

1995

Women’s Art Resource Centre

1992

PASTORALE Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1990

MORE BIRDS Haiku Gallery, St. Catharines, ON

1989

ABOUT BIRDS Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1986

NEW COLUMNS Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON FOUNDLINGS Hamilton Artists Inc., Hamilton, ON

1984

FLIGHT Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1983

Hennepin Art Gallery, Niagara College, Welland, ON

1982

Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON

JURIED EXHIBITIONS 1966

ANNUAL JURIED EXHIBIT Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1965

25th ANNUAL WESTERN ONTARIO EXHIBITION London Regional Art Gallery, London, ON 16th ANNUAL WINTER EXHIBITION Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON

1963

3rd ANNUAL JURIED SHOW Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1962

13th ANNUAL WINTER EXHIBITION Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON

1960

ANNUAL JURIED SHOW St. Catharines Public Library Gallery

1958

75th ANNUAL SPRING EXHIBITION Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, PQ 2nd NIAGARA DISTRICT JURY SHOW Niagara Falls, ON

1957

SPORT IN CANADA Canada’s Sports Hall Of Fame, Toronto, ON 17th ANNUAL WINTER EXHIBITION London Public Regional Art Gallery, London, ON 39

8th ANNUAL WINTER EXHIBITION Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON NIAGARA DISTRICT JURY SHOW Niagara Falls, ON

1956

73rd ANNUAL SPRING EXHIBITION Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, PQ THE 2nd WINNIPEG SHOW Winnipeg, Manitoba 17th ANNUAL WESTERN ONTARIO EXHIBITION London Regional Art Gallery, London, ON ANNUAL JURIED SHOW St. Catharines Public Library

1955

ANNUAL SPRING EXHIBITION Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, PQ 7th ANNUAL WINTER EXHIBITION Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON

1954

R.C.A. ANNUAL EXHIBITION Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, PQ

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2006

RITES OF PASSAGES Durham Art Gallery

2006

CRAM INAUGRAL Gallery CRAM, St. Catharines, ON

2004

NIAGARA EGO EXPOSITION (Johnny Canuck Redux) Niagara Artists’ Company, St. Catharines, ON

1997

ARTS & TARTS Niagara Artists’ Company, St. Catharines, ON

1996

WOMEN AND MEDICINE Niagara Artists’ Company, St. Catharines, ON

1995

DISTINCT VOICES With Mary Prittie And Lotti Thomas Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery

1992

TWO ROW WAMPUM PROJECT Niagara Falls Art Gallery with Bill Thoms, Shirley Cheechoo, Blake Degassige and Ruth Graviejs

1991

OUT OF RESPECT FOR THE LAND With Reinhard Reitzenstein, Franc Petric, Peter Gibson, Andre Perusse, Carolyn Walton Grimbsy Public Art Gallery, Grimbsy, ON

1989

FLIGHT PATTERN UNINTERRUPTED With An Whitlock and Micheal Belmore Definitely Superior, Thunder Bay, ON

1988

STYLITE – Exchange, Struts Gallery Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB SOUNDINGS FROM THE UNDERBELLY Site-specific Urban Installations, St. Catharines, Ontario NEW WORKS Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON 30 POINTS OF VIEW Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1987

N.A.C. at 101 – Exchange Show Gallery 101, Ottawa, Ontario

1986

TOY SHOW Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON THIS IS NIAGARA – 34 Points of View Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON 41

1985

SELF PORTRAIT SHOW Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1982

TOY SHOW Hamilton Artists Inc., Hamilton ON NAC / ARTSPACE EXCHANGE Artspace, Peterborough, Ontario NIAGARA NEW IMAGES Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1981

TWO PERSON SHOW Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1978

JOHNNY CANUCK CANADIAN EGO EXHIBITIONIST Touring show throughout Ontario – Paris, London, Brussels, etc Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1973

ART BLITZ Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1972

JOHNNY CANUCK CANADIAN EGO EXHIBITION Touring show to Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, France; Canada House, London, England; Brussels, Belgium; Paris, France; London, ON, Niagara Artists’ Centre, St. Catharines, ON NIAGARA NOW Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1970

SOUL OF NIAGARA Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON Kitchener, Ontario

1967

THREE MAN SHOW Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, ON

1965

THE REGIONAL EYE - 5 Women Painters of the Niagara Peninsula London Art Gallery, London, ON

GRANTS Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance: 1984, 1986, 1991 Ontario Arts Council Artist-In-Residence: 1988, Definitely Superior, Thunder Bay, ON PURCHASES Canada Council Art Bank, 1990 Numerous private collections ART – RELATED EXPERIENCE Taught children’s art classes for St. Catharines Art Association Publisher & editor of Twelve Mile Creek; Niagara Artists’ Centre, circa early 1970’s Set designer, acting; St. Catharines Community Theatre & Press Theatre Set designer; Shaw Festival in its first year Founding member and board member; Niagara Artists’ Centre until 1994 Board member Durham Art Gallery, 1997

photo by Sandy Fairbairn

photo by Melanie MacDonald

Syd, Sam and Alice, the driving enthusiast. Over the years, Alice has owned a variety of exotic and unusual vehicles, including: a 1950 Riley, a 1958 Triumph TR3, a 1965 Isuzu, a 1970 Datsun 240z, a 1980 Saab 900, a 1984 Pontiac Fiero, and a 1977 Corvette L48.

354 St. Paul Street St.Catharines, ON L2R 3N2 t 905-641-0331 f 905-641-4970 www.nac.org artists@nac.org