Natural Resources
1991 profile in Ontario Craft Magazine
Ontario Craft Magazine, Summer 1991 edition, by Maja Miller
From her studio on Toronto’s Queen Street West, Keene creates felted works that hang in museum, gallery, and corporate collections. Photo credit: Peter Newman
After a day in her studio carding flax and pounding it into felted wall hangings, Susan Warner Keene walks her old black bike onto the ferry that will take her across Toronto Harbour to her home on Ward’s Island. As the boat pulls out and the glass-towered skyline recedes, the wind catches her long blonde ponytail and the sleeves of her oversized acid-washed denim jacket. Long, lean, and elegant despite the chilly February gusts, Keene, 41, scans the sunappled waves. She looks up, smiles open-mouthed, and points skyward.
This is the final shot of a 10-minute video about Keene and her felted reliefs. And even though the cameraperson recording her ferry crossing did not catch the flock of swans passing overhead, it’s a fitting image of this fibre artist who observes nature and explores mankind’s perception of it through her work.
The video crowned the presentation to Keene of the fifteenth annual Saidye Bronfman Award for Excellence in the Crafts, the highest honour for a craftsperson in Canada. On March 14, 1991, in a plush intimate theatre cradled in one of the undulating curves of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Keene, this time swathed in an oversized silk jacket, was visibly relieved that the secret she’s been keeping since January was finally going public.
The Bronfman, with its $20,000 purse, is one more feather in Keene’s already decorated cap. Since graduating from art school 12 years ago, she has exhibited in more than 41 shows from Vancouver to Montreal, in Europe and Australia. Her work hangs in museum, gallery, and corporate collections across Canada, including the Museum of Civilization, which purchased four of her pieces as part of the award.
The museum’s four works, housed behind glass and lit dramatically from below for the ceremony, share the same complicated surfaces and earthy palette of reds, ochres, blue-greens, and blacks. Abstract and nonfunctional, Keene’s work is intellectual and singular, partly because of her unique technique. While there are other artists, felt makers, and papermakers in North America and elsewhere whose work is in some ways similar to Keene’s, her artistic vision and way of realizing it is solely her own.
Keene never intended to become a fibre artist. She wanted to be a journalist, “a foreign correspondent in a trench coat.” But somewhere along the way, she took a different course. After finishing high school in 1964 she left her parent’s home in the Rockcliffe Park area of Ottawa, and went to work for family friends in Tucson, Arizona.
The following year she began her bachelor of arts in english literature at Mackinac College in Michigan. The college has a small campus on Mackinac Island in the straits connecting Lakes Huron and Michigan, just west of Manitoulin Island in Ontario. Perhaps because of her experience on that island,
which is mostly a state park that doesn’t allow cars to drive through its wilderness, Keene is attracted to islands and the cultures that develop there in relative isolation.
Taking advantage of the school’s off-campus programme, she spent one semester in Los Angeles as an intern at Pace magazine, a publication about young movers and shakers, where she wrote, among other assignments, a profile on Bobbie Gentry, the one-hit pop star famous for “Ode to Billie Joe.” In her final semester, she persuaded the english department to let her study the stories of preliterate cultures in the American Southwest. “I convinced them I wanted to write a poetry manuscript about the confluence of cultures in New Mexico. I basically wanted to live in Sante Fe,” she says candidly, pointing out that after all, it was the sixties. “I’d been through there and was really drawn to the area. I was quite curious about this whole Spanish, Anglo, Native mix.” And it was while she was there in the desert that she began to understand the visual aspects of culture. “I started to see buildings, the Anasazi ruins, the pictographs. I started to read about some of the pictographs and the role that they had played.”
When she graduated and left Arizona in 1970, her interest in cultural symbols continued through books. Back in Toronto still pursuing writing, she found a job as a research assistant with the Royal Commission on Book Publishing. For a year and-a-half she surveyed the industry and edited background papers. She moved to the Toronto Islands, thought about going back to school, and applied to the University of Arizona for graduate studies in anthropology. But between applying and being accepted, she met Peter Newman, a television floor director, with whom she still lives.
Keene stayed on Ward’s Island, working three days a week in the trade division of Clarke Irwin. While she enjoyed it, she tired of working on other people’s copy. “I had this really profound sense of being split bilaterally down the middle,” she recalls. “Only half of me functioned. Only half of me worked.” This was before she had heard anything about the creative functions of the right brain and the rational processes of the left brain, but now she understands her dilemma as a need to be creative. At this point she took up embroidery, which she had learned as a child.
Made in 190, Transformation of Regret: Version #1 is part of a three-piece series, which includes Version #3 on the cover.
After a trip to the Outer Hebrides at Callanish in the mid-seventies, Keene became interested in Celtic monuments. Inspired by the voyage, she created Metaphoric Landscape: Callandish in 1981.
Like Decorated Dwelling #2 (1984), each of Keene’s pieces starts as a small drawing in her sketchbook.
Commissioned by M. Joan Chalmers, Imagining the Whole (1991) measures 213 x 107 x 7.6 cm.
An experienced sewer now embroidering, Keene decided to learn to weave and started taking classes with Robert Caywood who ran the Village Weaver, a Toronto business that sold yarns and taught weaving. As her weaving progressed she began to realize “the depths of my ignorance about textiles and a visual vocabulary.” So she applied to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto at the age of 26, thinking she’d catch up on the fundamentals, and committing herself only to the foundation year. By the end of that first year she realized how much more she didn’t know and continued the full four years.
While studying tapestry with Helen Frances Gregor, Joanna Staniszkis, and William Hodge, she became interested in the shape, surface, and repetition of objects, particularly Celtic monuments like one she had visited in the mid-seventies in the Outer Hebrides, at Callanish, a ring of standing stones smaller than Stonehenge. “From a technical point of view I started realizing that weaving really wasn’t going to be the way that 1 was able to explore some of these things because that linear construction approach was too eloquent of itself. It spoke too much of itself. It has a powerful language, but it seemed to get in the way of what I was interested in doing at that point.”
What she wanted to do was break away from the loom’s rectangular format and perpendiculars to weave more organically shaped tapestries. So she started experimenting. Her last tapestry woven pieces, made in 1979, have no straight edges, despite being loom-woven. They are highly three-dimensional with ridges and tufts of raw fibre made by arduously shifting and packing the weft along the warp after removal from the loom. For the most part, they are monochrome, the natural colour of her sisal and linen materials.
While in the Royal Ontario Museum one day with Gregor and her class, she came upon an exhibition of felt from Iran and Turkey. “Here was this amazing felt exhibition,” says Keene, still incredulous. “They had garments, those amazing mantles that look like walking rocks when they’re worn. I’d never seen anything like them. Michael (Gervers) had taken pictures of how the stuff was made and it was a real mind blower … sort of an amazing transformation of the raw material, and great clouds of fleece everywhere.”
It wasn’t until she finished school that she had time to go back to the ROM and research felt making more thoroughly. The result was an article in Craftsman, now Ontario Craft magazine, where she was associate editor on a part-time basis for nine years until 1988. “I was fascinated by the simplicity
of the technical means and the total physical involvement required,” she wrote. “And by the ingenious ways in which felt makers exploited the possibility for three-dimensional surface design.”
Keene’s first felt experiments were with wool, the traditional felt making material. Wool, which is covered with microscopic scales, tends to hook into itself and as it shrinks with heat, moisture, pressure, and agitation, it mats. When dry, the fabric is a soft, dense, permanently tangled, compacted mesh of fibres. So, with a supply of wool and a variety of buckets and tubs, Keene donned her rubber boots and set to stomping felt in her backyard on the Island.
Since then, she’s moved into a studio on Queen Street West in Toronto, and refined her technique considerably, and switched to flax from wool because it is tougher. (She insists the preference has nothing to do with her being vegetarian.) Imported from Belgium, her flax is a high quality, expensive fibre. Wearing a mask to protect herself from the dust, she chops it into 2.5 centimetre (one inch) lengths and feeds it through a tabletop drum carder to make uniformly thick cloud-like batting.
Each finished piece starts as a small drawing in a sketchbook. From there, she scales up her design and makes templates from its various components, like the pieces of a sewing pattern. She tapes the pattern pieces on a table, places a screen overtop, and begins to lay down her flax. Depending on the size of the piece, she usually builds up three layers of batting, each perpendicular to the last to form a strong base.On top of this, she spreads a fourth layer of coloured batting that will set the tone of the piece and unify it, like a colour wash does in painting.
She dyes the flax herself and blends it with hand carders, adding or subtracting coloured fleece to get a lighter or darker mix. Carefully placing the carded fleece on top of the base, she constructs her various colour gradations, and elements, often adding little bits of carded fibres for softened shapes or small
pieces that have already been soaked and pressed to make more hard-edged marks. “You can get the whole thing laid down and decide it’s really not quite what it needs to be and you can pull off half of it and start all over again,” she explains. “It’s like a collage process in that until you’ve got it all stuck down everything is up for grabs.” She further enhances the texture by laying on shredded, dyed cheesecloth threads, which are larger than the flax fibres and add a different look to the surface. If the piece is to have any projecting three-dimensional flaps or points, they are inserted into slashes in the main fabric at this stage, too. Before soaking the layers in an old bathtub, she places another screen over top and stitches the whole together like a flax sandwich.
Using a technique similar to collage, Keene made
Gathering in 1989 from her usual mix of dyed flax and linen thread.
Continuing the physical part of the process, she removes the wet bundle, spreads it on the floor, and alternately pounds it with a rubber mallet and presses it with a small handheld roller until the flax fibres are well crushed and enmeshed. She’s lucky there’s been no one in the studio below her for about eight years, although her new neighbours in a studio building she cooperatively bought this spring may have some complaints.
While the work is still wet she removes it from the screens and coats it with a dilute acrylic medium to size the work and seal it from airborne dust and moisture. She spreads the wet mass flat or over a chicken wire form, with wads of plastic inserted underneath any flaps or points that will project. When dry, the felt holds its shape permanently.
“Susan’s really developed a very personal way of working and a really wonderful way of using the materials,” says Suzann Greenaway, an ex-Islander herself who’s represented Keene at her Toronto gallery, Prime Canadian Crafts, since she opened it 12 years ago. “It’s basically a kind of collage technique with inlay and onlay.” Because the natural fibre is the finished work itself, Keene must colour, order, and process it to give it meaning.
Keene chooses the shapes for her works deliberately, looking for archetypal forms that occur both in nature and the human-made environment. A piece she finished late this spring is shaped like a kepenek, one of those amazing walking-rock mantles she first saw at the ROM. In the mid-eighties, she was inspired by architecture. “I got interested in the generalized, abstract notions of shelter,” she says, perched atop an old sheepskin slung over a metal stool in her studio. “And what it is we try to do or say about ourselves with buildings.” That led to a series of works in 1984 called Imagined Facade. Human-sized, they were conceived of as body masks, surrogates that a person might carry in front of him or herself.
The first one, called Imagined Facade #1, now hangs in the reception area of the Ontario Crafts Council. The work, like the series, is meant to be playful. It has a jaunty blue rectangle at the top like a roof and two little legs — one sharply pointed and the other a thick ruffled panel.
Two years later at the Burlington Cultural Centre, Keene did an installation of three wall-sized pieces that were meditations on the larger human-made environment — artificial landscapes. The Australian Aborigines, she had read, built huge replications of mountains and things for certain ceremonies, and when done, pulled them apart. She thought that in a way that’s what we do, too. “We create these cities and then take them all down and put up something else,” she says. “This is how we look and this is how we think about the world and we’re going to structure it that way.”
The third component of the installation was In the Family of Places: Encampment by Water, a huge ragged arc of eight irregular overlapping parts full of subtle complexities and resonances. The work is a personal one based on Keene’s own settlement — the Toronto Islands community and landscape.
Keene showed Encampment again in a solo exhibition in 1988, Out of Nature, at Prime Canadian Crafts. “I was looking at animals and the natural world as opposed to the artificial world,” she explains. “I shifted my attention to the way they represent things to us and the way we use them as symbols. They stand in for us.” Small, brightly coloured, bristling with charged points, and shaped vaguely like milkweed pods, snakes, and fish, the works from this show depict not so much what things look like, as what the associations we attach to them might look like. For instance, in Surrogate: Seeking the Blessing, a fish-like piece covered with a rainbow sweep of points, Keene intended to evoke the idea of fish coupled with the notion of a surrogate or stand-in. It can be read as a Christian symbol or more generally as a ritual sacrifice. “You paint up the victim then you cut its throat,” says Keene, laughing at her own matter-of-factness. “Sort of like cooking, too, I suppose.”
The pieces in that show worked together to suggest a narrative, and given Keene’s background in literature, it’s not surprising that she likes to work in series. Last year she constructed Transformations of Regret, made up of three pieces — a spiky pod emerging from a rectangle of patches, a tight seamed circular spiral, and a wide green ruffle falling from a slightly tapering rectangle. Mysterious yet somehow familiar — they look like plant, animal, or human parts, clothing, or primitive art — the fabrics beg the viewer to interpret them.
The title of the series refers to a passage in Crossing Open Ground, a book of essays by American author Barry Lopez. “As the Anasazi had a complicated culture, so have we,” writes Lopez. “We are takers of notes, measurers of stone, examiners of fragments in the dust. We search for order in chaos wherever we go. We worry over what is lost…. One of the greatest dreams of man must be to find some place between nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.” Keene sees the relationship between nature and culture as the crux of the human dilemma, and creativity as the way to find balance between the two.
Between her studio in downtown Toronto and her small cottage-like home on Ward’s Island, Keene is trying to find that balance. As an artist, she constructs tremendously complicated surface textures — subtle earthy colourations, innumerable squiggles, marks, and imprints. And as an Islander, she lives in a close, almost rural community in the shadow of Toronto. So the final shot of the video, of Keene crossing the gap, symbolizes more than what was captured on video. Still, the final frame is fitting if a bit cliché.