(UNTITLED) LABOURERS

Aim E Lebeau

Aimée Lebeau is an interdisciplinary, mixed-media artist in the Art Education program at Concordia University, and has a previous degree in Painting and Drawing. Lebeau’s works are born from explorations of various materials and approaches to artmaking. Lebeau’s earlier works have a memoiristic quality, tending toward figurative painting. In these works, she used fragmented memories and familial photographic archives to weave unique visual narratives. A more recent focus of the artist has been to generate an intentional union of a distinctly painterly visual style with fibre-based materials and practices, including reclaimed and recycled fabrics. Her explorations in fibres led to the production of Untitled (Labourers). In this work, Lebeau mined the gap between the different mediums. She says, “I was interested in exploring the dichotomy between painting and textile, and how historically, painting has been more of a male-dominated field, whereas textile work has been seen as women’s work.” Within and beyond art history, craft has often been relegated to a status of lesser art. Typically performed by women and non-male groups and individuals, craftwork (including textile work, ceramics, and other so-called “decorative arts”) has not been as valued as “high-art” forms such as oil painting. This is especially true within the Western art historical canon. In Untitled (Labourers), Lebeau wanted to dissolve the boundaries between textile work and painting to create a dialogue between the two. This work was created in Lebeau’s home, while she was sick with COVID-19. Limited by a lack of access to her school’s studios, she created a remote screen-printing set up and got to work. The ‘painting’ in this work was also screen-printed, but on canvas with acrylic paint. The repeated pattern that makes up Untitled (Labourers) is an original motif.

Seen from a distance, it resembles a decorative floral design, but a closer look reveals a series of interconnected figures. This complex visual pattern highlights the hidden labour behind the production and manufacturing of various materials used in artmaking—often taken for granted in the process of creating work. Lebeau grounded her ideas in Canadian women’s scholar Gail Cuthbert Brandt’s essay, “Weaving it Together: Life Cycle and the Industrial Experience of Female Cotton Workers in Quebec, 1910-1950” (ca. 1981). Other sources of visual inspiration included various modern and contemporary artists, such as Anni Albers and Yayoi Kusuma.

Untitled (Labourers) is a complex and layered work, and reveals Lebeau’s broader conceptual concerns, bringing to light various tensions in art history and art production. The artist wanted to probe the placement of societal values to visualize the ubiquity of the textile medium and the simultaneous indifference to the labour behind its production.