REST FROM SORROW: The Art of Catherine Daigle
November 28, 1953 – December 12, 2006
By Betty Ann Jordan, with Mark Adair and Isabel Stukator
“Something must be lost or absent in any narrative for it to unfold: if everything stayed in place, there would be no story to tell.”
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
“Works of art are responses in [ongoing] conversations about making meaning, which is why understanding a work of art often entails knowing the conversation: a displaced work of art is a non sequitur, a milestone without its road. So, a work of art speaks in chorus of its maker’s work, its place in culture, its materials and economics. The mortality of an artwork underscores the survival through conversation, and the necessity of maintenance, acts of faith that must themselves be permanently renewed in a world that is constantly being made and is never finished.”
Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent
We remember things but we don't remember experience. [What we have done] has largely been informed by an interest in the transitory nature of life and how we, on a regular basis, reconfigure deeds to provide meaning.
Catherine Daigle quoted in Torontoniensis catalogue, 2008, essay by Gordon Hatt
FOREWORD
Catherine Daigle’s story is informed by accounts provided by several close friends. Her life partner Mark Adair, fellow artist and fellow-member of the Torontoniensis art collective is deeply interested in personal histories and has given a great deal of thought to the circumstances of Catherine’s life and death. Now in the process of archiving Catherine’s art on a dedicated web site, her friend, artist, educator and designer Isabel Stukator spent considerable time with Catherine during the harrowing final months of her life. Although Catherine and I worked for Key Publishers, owners of Toronto Life magazine in the same rambling office building where Catherine laboured part-time as a graphic artist for sixteen years, we never formally met there. Our paths officially crossed in April 1999 when I, now a freelance art writer, interviewed her in her west-end loft-studio about her upcoming exhibition. While we were talking, I remember thinking that she was living the dream, making strong work in a classic, high-ceilinged industrial loft space with sunlight streaming through the window.
REST FROM SORROW: The Art of Catherine Daigle
Catherine Eleanor Daigle was a Toronto artist who died too young, at 53, from liver disease and complications. Born into a blue-collar family in Scarborough, she died on December 12, 2006. Actively engaged in exhibiting in Toronto during the booming ’80s, the recessionary ’90s, and the consumer- and fear-driven first decade of the 21st century, her life and death exemplify many of the issues and challenges facing artists of her generation, especially women artists. Coming of age during the second generation of feminism, she and her peers were presented with wide-ranging expectations and possibilities that were at once taxing, confusing, and liberating.
Attractive and lithe, with a beguiling mop of L’il Orphan Annie strawberry-blonde curls, Catherine was perennially mistaken for a much younger person. A lover of travel and adventure, after high school she did a bit of travelling in Europe. Growing up she had no art exposure but what she saw abroad whetted her appetite. Eventually she enrolled at the Ontario College of Art as a mature student, putting herself through by doing odd jobs. She was 32 years old when her first installation appeared in the window of Union Station in 1985. Purposefully she found her creative voice, pushing through the prevailing ’80s and early ’90s atmosphere of cynicism, opportunism and political correctness. Mark has few fond memories of the Toronto art scene in the 1980s. He recalls the time as being “a tough period when the art world was kidnapped by brilliant people who weren't artists. Talking about art was more important than making it.” There was also a political agenda revolving around gender issues especially gay identity. He and Catherine both “made stuff when it wasn't okay to make things -- in those days art had to have a discourse.” He continues, “Catherine thought her job was to make art, not to be discursive.” However, in 1991, the tide turned. Mark recalls, “You no longer needed to be an ‘ist’, that is, an ‘ecologist’ or a ‘feminist.’” By the time Catherine died, the Toronto commercial art scene was ebullient. The need for self-organized collective exhibitions in rented spaces was far less acute with the proliferation of commercial galleries and the maturing of the public gallery matrix. The once-sleepy Canadian art market had heated up. This all made the enterprise seem more viable. But for Catherine, the years between 2004 and 2006 were marred by overwork, emotional distress over job and relationship insecurities and crippling insomnia.
These complexities and contradictions form the warp of her story, while talent and dedication fill in the weft, bringing colour, pattern, content to the overall design. A city girl, she privileged nature above culture, honouring the wisdom of the earth and its creatures. Essentially solitary, she worked hard to promote her work and that of her fellow members in the artists’ collective Torontoniensis. A victim of a violent attack in her youth, and touched by bad luck later in life, she struggled with apprehension, doubt and sadness. Nonetheless, she believed fiercely in the redemptive ability of art to heal psychic wounds. Her belief was so strong, that she neglected to look after herself in practical physical ways that might have prolonged her life.
A painter, drawer, sculptor and mixed-media assemblage artist with a literary bent, Catherine mature work includes serene atmospheric landscapes and vanitas (life is short) still-life tableaux with dead fruit, plants, bones. She had just fully hit her stride when stress and ill-health slowed her production, never copious. She thought hard about what she was doing before she did it and was not given to spontaneity. Drafting a statement to accompany an exhibition proposal, Catherine wrote in her notebook in 1998: “The original concept for the still life series is the idea of loss. I will be photographing an elaborate still life in the style of the 17th century Dutch masters. I plan to photograph it daily – as it slowly decomposes.” Even as she delved into traditional genres, there was an edge to her oeuvre, informed by her research and ruminations upon the history of women’s work.
She writes in the same notebook: “The modern history of women’s work is the history of women under pressure.” Alluding to a 1998 series Pear Pieces: Vanitas, she looks back at a series of 7 wall-works (in which she paired dried and compressed pear halves, combining them with words relating to her theme such as “compress,” “crush,” “strain,” “reduce….”): “In 1991 I assembled a series of dried fruit and flowers that had been compressed with the aid of an old butter churn converted to a press. It has always been my hope to display this work as an installation, including the converted butter churn. It seems an embodiment of the history of women’s work. The butter churn represents the best and worst of the history of women’s work because while it resonates of the domestic it nonetheless harkens back to a previous time where women from outside of the upper class were able to have economic independence. During the 17th and 18th century (still agricultural societies) it was common for women to own the dairy which was their own private income. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that they became completely dependent on men’s income. The conversion of the churn into a press is appropriate in this historical context, as is my use of pressure and the theme of pressure.”
Isabel recalls, “We didn’t talk about it, but feminism was the context of how we all lived, the way we all were at that time.” To provide context, Sherry-Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" points to the crux of the gender bias, pointing to why high-art making has for centuries been a male-dominated activity. Turning the idea on its head, agit-prop artist Barbara Kruger's 1983 poster defiantly insisted “We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture.” Mark recalls that he and Catherine talked “endlessly” about sexism in the arts.
Further on, Catherine also comments upon the flora that were to figure prominently in future works. “Fruit and flowers are considered common symbols of the domestic world which still today is considered the women’s world, the world of food and comfort. These materials are a reference to the limitations still placed on women.” Seeking to better understand the conditions which women of her grandparents’ generation, she created the Eleanor series of shadowboxes involving small objects and quotes drawn from the Dirty Thirties, reminiscences of her paternal grandmother reproduced in a book by broadcaster Bill McNeil (a compilation of interviews he’d conducted for his “Voice of the Pioneer” radio series.) Inspired by her grandmother Eleanor’s perseverance, one of the thirteen modest but thoughtful ensuing works includes a brace of metal toys, including a steamship and a train steam engine, suspended above a painted golden-sky while in the dark below appears Catherine’s forebear’s words: "When I was fourteen, I left London and came to Canada to join my father in Saskatchewan. This meant crossing the Atlantic by ship and then travelling across the country by train. It was a very long journey."
Pressure and stress were not only metaphors deployed in Catherine’s art but constants in her personal life. Stubborn and determined, she made financial sacrifices, was disinclined to compromise (which she once described as selling out), and demanded nothing less than everything from herself. Her clear-eyed assessment of her situation is outlined in her notebook dating from 1998: “I have reached a time in my life where it has become all too apparent to me that a life of physical comfort and financial security is beyond my grasp. Consciously, or unconsciously, I have chosen this path and now at the age of 45 feel that even if I wanted to change that, it’s too late. I think that this might have something to do with why I want to make the art I want to make. I think maybe this next piece [never executed, it concerned elemental symbols of earth, water, fire, and air] is about my search, interest, whatever in finding pleasure and meaning in things that seem to me to be of far greater importance than our current society would lead one to believe. I’m not saying or doing anything new, but it feels like the right time of my life to travel down this well-trodden path, but through my eyes and through my past and present.”
Brave and sincere words articulating her mission, they couldn’t prevent her from being terribly distressed when she lost her job at Toronto Life in late 2003, just before Christmas, only months after buying a fixer-up house with Mark. Natural as these reactions were, Catherine had not developed coping skills and outlets that would have permitted her to recover from these setbacks in a reasonable amount of time. From this point on, the course of her life ran downhill. For Catherine, the years between 2004 and 2006 were marred by overwork, emotional distress over job and relationship insecurities and crippling insomnia. Says Mark, "Catherine died, killed by the pain of seeing how undervalued artists are here in Toronto and in Canada. Society exploits artists knowing that they will make art no matter what, even if they are not paid. He quotes Adler: "Human beings have an innate need to be recognized."
“Fear of seduction is fear of one’s own vulnerability to others, and it may be because beauty reminds us of vulnerability that it is traditionally located in young, fragile things, in flowers and youths, and now as well in emblems of mortality, in the ancient, decrepit, beautiful ruins, in death too. It is the tension that beauty brings, of temptation and desire fulfilled and unfulfilled, that makes up life. There is another seduction, the seduction of power, of having control over a subject, and the hostility to beauty may come from this, from those who have succumbed to this will to power.” Solnit, ibid
“Beauty always has a relation to mortality, which has sometimes been seen as negating it, sometimes as underscoring it. In a brief essay, Julia Kristeva proposes beauty as a “beyond” that the psyche produces in order not to be overwhelmed by death, as “the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to live.” Ibid
Catherine felt conflicted over her inclination towards beauty, expressed in her intense appreciation of nature. In speaking about her series of cloud paintings she wrote sheepishly in her notebook in November ’93, “For some reason, it felt liberating to give into a beautiful image.” For her, intent and intense, nature was a direct conduit to joy, happiness and the relaxation that had often eluded her. Rugged landscapes, such as the ones she first encountered on monthly camping trips with Mark, were a revelation and the aesthetic yardstick that she used to measure her own success as an artist. They got out into the country, at least once a month, even winter camping, except in January. On McQuade Island they were caught in an apocalyptic storm that lasted for six hours; holding the tent down as it filled with water, they fell asleep shaking. “We couldn't hear each other,” Mark recalls, “it was like an artillery bombardment," a near-death experience that left him with a lingering sense of foreboding.
Her Drawing from Memory series consists of thirteen black and white renderings of the rugged Ontario locales where they camped. The drawings were mounted in individual hand-crafted wooden frames with peaked “roofs,” lending them a votive air recalling The Stations of the Cross. (Given her Catholic upbringing, Catherine would have been familiar with the fourteen stations, depictions of the last hours of Christ, invitations to meditate in a spirit of reparation.) Inscribed at the top of each, along with a small painting of the moon, captured in its various stages, was the name of the locale; collectively they constituted a litany of place names including Tim River, Hamilton Harbour, Butt Lake, Baron Canyon, Bunchberry Creek, Oxford County, McQuade Island, Marmora, Rain Lake, Flowerpot Island.
The impression, conveyed by these and subsequent heavy religious-icon-like box frames for future landscape works was of a deep desire to protect and cherish memories that might otherwise be vulnerable to damage or neglect. Mark says that her elaborate frames were to protect the fragile, precarious, sacred world “full of treasures” that could be defiled. A professional carpenter and woodworker Mark offered to help make the frames but she wouldn’t accept his offer. Catherine’s default stance was "I can do this all myself."
“Both modernism and postmodernism are essentially urban, eastern [eastern USA] practices. In both, landscape has been considered the most pedestrian unintellectual of the themes of visual art, a kind of mental picnic.” Ibid
“The landscape is no longer a given but a threatened territory. The primary landscape tradition for Western civilization is that of the pastoral, in both literature and art the pastoral is the antithesis of the city, a refuge from the politics and corruption of cities, a place of virtue, a place significantly outside history and ruled by cyclical rather than linear time. The pastoral at is most banal is the resort, vacationland, campsite.” Ibid
In the 1990s landscape paintings were seen as retrograde especially beautiful ones such as those in her Paradise Gardens (1997) suite of four large oils in wide, heavy, formal frames, verging on the ecclesiastical. Misty and diffused, the first three depict dawn to dusk expanses of water bounded by a line of trees along the horizon line; the fourth, a night view, has hint of tops of trees in the foreground, then an expanse of water in the middle and far distance. Mark recalls, “The extreme suspicion with which beauty was regarded at this time had to be lived through to be believed.” Just as politicized feminists eschewed wearing makeup and pretty clothing as pandering to the patriarchy, vanguard artists protested “politically appropriate” (read exploitive) language and imagery, especially relating to women and children. Horizontal, passive landscape was equated with the feminine principle in nature (behind every rolling hill lurked intimations of a reclining nude at the mercy of a predatory male gaze or a polluting industrialist).
The Paradise Garden series had its genesis in a commission consisting of two 16-foot panels that Catherine completed for a client with a country place in Cold Spring, south of Poughkeepsie, NY on the fabled Hudson River. To prepare maquettes for that project she studied the celebrated Hudson River school of landscape painters of the mid-1900s. After completing the commission, she made these paintings for herself. Texts on the frames were gorgeous passages from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Catherine added the texts because, as she noted, “it gives the series more meaning.” For example, the dusk image, bathed in brownish light bears the Canto II inscription from Inferno I: “The day was going, the brown evening was taking all the creatures of the earth away from toil.” Catherine, while uninterested in the Group of Seven, nonetheless falls into their landscape tradition. Mark says the "the piece talks about losing this beautiful world,” hence the funereal wood bordering the riverbank.
She was sustained by the still-life paintings of the Dutch master painters. As early as 1994 she wrote: “Thinking about doing a series of still lifes of dead birds, fish, bones, flowers, a composite of fairly small pieces, grouped together in a single frame similar to European altarpieces of the 15th century. I would like to capture the sense of stillness [that] adds a certain sadness to the beauty of the images. Although my choice of imagery may seem morbid, I’m not interested in projecting that kind of sentiment [but rather] a sadness for what once was and is now lost…a reflection on the cycles of life.”
Five years later, in 1999, that aspiration was embodied in a key work made for a Torontoniensis group show entitled No Fun Without You. Bringing considerable gravitas to the show, her Stilleven tableau consisted of an array of dried fruits and dessicated vegetables, with a fragile, soft grass spun bird's nest in the middle, illumined by natural light filtred through a small aperture concealed by the upper part of the frame. Inside the box is velvety dark so that the objects have a dramatic, shadowy quality, while brownish faded colours evoke the darkening effect of varnish on historic paintings. Tap-roots of radishes and scallions, dangle down over the cap-lettered inscriptions on the edge of a black table-top-like interior shelf, in a glass-fronted wooden box. The first piece to overtly explore death’s inevitability, it was potent and moving, with a bird’s nest in the middle that I perceived at the time as being “wistful”. Along the bottom edge it bore an inscription taken from The Meadow, a novel by James Galvin about one-hundred years of natural and human history in a meadow in the mountains along the Colorado/Wyoming border. Mark recalls that the book with its emphasis on survival and continuity resonated deeply for Catherine. Echoing the horizontal format of the piece, the line read, “When we think of our lives as what we have done, memory becomes a museum with one long shelf on which we arrange a bric-a-brac of deeds, each to his liking.”
The single most defining and uncanny feature of Catherine’s practice, however, was her growing focus on (and indeed comfort with) the irrevocability of decay and death. “The passage of time,” was a phrase that she used constantly, acknowledging a reality that she never lost sight of. Given her untimely passing, one wonders if she had intimations of her own approaching mortality.
Prone to undervaluing her achievements, Catherine knew that Stilleven was important. Her notes confirm this: “Meditations on the vitality of life, the certainty of death… Stilleven was a very successful piece. Simple, beautiful to look at and I think somehow, and I take no credit for this, dead on the money. A memento mori about the transcient nature of life. Stilleven was about the physical world, the effects of aging on the mind and body. The cycle of life is a theme that continues to be of interest. This new work [at the time she was contemplating making a series of small ‘passion plays’ about the meaning of life, inspired by Punch and Judy shows] is more involved in what lies beyond that – not the supernatural, but rather the spiritual side of the life-cycle. About the regenerative nature of life, the way one form of life when at the end of its cycle transmutes to another. It’s the ‘another’ that interests me.”
“Bees investigate and gather up the life of the landscape, bring it home, and transform it into honey, and Thompson regularly reminds his audience that honey is a vehicle of communication and cooperation for bees, as well as an end product. Put into an art context, bees are a way to explore the landscape symbolically, as well as a powerful symbol of the distillation of experience into an essence, honey, and an architecture, honeycomb.” Ibid
The themes of Stilleven were further developed in the authoritative Hard Questions and Many Riddles (2002), characterized by Mark as centring on “issues of knowability versus unknowability.” Made for the Songs from the Waterfront show, once again, a complex arrangement of desiccated fruits and vegetables is encased in a black-lined, glass-fronted wall-mounted vitrine, actually three shadow-boxes conjoined to make one contiguous work. The central shadow-box in Hard Questions contains a faded but lovely bouquet of dried flowers and fruit, including a leaf from Frida Kahlo’s garden that Mark gave to Catherine. Pointing to the back-story for the piece, on black background panels the artist lettrasetted passages from the biblical Song of Solomon. (The work relates to a legend in which the Queen of Sheba, wanting to test King Solomon’s powers of observation, had two bouquets made – including one with artificial blossoms. When challenged to identify the real flowers, the king flung open a window so that a passing bee could zero in on the real blooms.) This shadow-box is book-ended by two photos of the artist’s hand, actually plaster cast replicas. A bee has alighted on the upward-pointing index finger of one pale and lifeless hand while in another photo, a red rose rests on the open palm. Having discussed the vitrines at length with Catherine, Mark observes, “One of the metaphors of Sheba's silken flowers is the problem of the difficulty of deliberate deceit -- even the wisest of us can be practically helpless against it.” He produces a slip of paper on which Catherine had written, “I employ synthetic flowers as symbols of the altered world ... for every action in nature there is always judgment. Balance.”
Completing the trio of still lifes in glass-fronted boxes,Catherine’s most authoritative and fully realized works, Spilt Salt, (2003) alludes to Leonardo da Vinci’s famed fresco of The Last Supper in which Judas’s betrayal of Jesus is signified by his overturned goblet from which flows salt instead of wine. Recalling their conversation, Mark says “The spilling of salt, that most precious commodity, is the spilling of our faith and our hope.”
An extension of the ideas about falsity and authenticity in Hard Questions, Catherine floated a silkscreened swarm of flies over a square patch of polyester daisies in one of a series of late works in her Hissing for Flies series. All four Hissing works incorporated fake yellow daisies. “The daisies were emblems of falsehood and betrayal,” recalls Mark, a notion countered by the fact that Catherine bought large quantities of them at the dollar store, thoroughly pleased with her discount-store treasure hunting. Another daisy piece, created for the Torontoniensis Suitcase show, consists of an open suitcase, its lid lined with black-eyed susans, a swarm of flies issuing from its interior. The sombre note is extended by another Hissing piece, a backlit cibachrome photo of a bed of daisies. Superimposed over the image are the words “When daddy comes home all the fun stops,” alluding to uneasy family dynamics. Regarding these works, the euphemism for death (he’s “pushing up daisies”) comes to mind, along with the recollection that flies are usually the first to arrive at a death scene. Is it macabre to wonder if Catherine had intimations?
Things were very bad by the time Catherine created her final uncanny triptych entitled Rest from Sorrow, Rest from Fear, Rest from Bondage (2006). She was sick, menopausal, sleep-deprived and scrambling to deliver on a challenging high-profile contract that was essential to the bottom line for her fledgling business. There were nagging concerns about ending up old and poor. She turned to alcohol as a form of self-medication, more than anyone realized.
Several of the later Torontoniensis shows and her own solo exhibitions had not garnered the critical attention she felt they deserved. Indeed the prevalent consumer culture continued to be disrespectful of artists. Also, she struggled with a suffocating sense of betrayal. Having been dismissed from a sixteen-year contract position with a formerly trusted employer confirmed her fear that people had become expendable in the corporate workplace. And most painfully, her intimate relationship with Mark, rocky over the last several years, had come well and truly undone. The artworks, three shadow-boxes, were dead-simple: the title words in which the longed-for “rest” is repeatedly invoked, are nearly buried in a mantle of red silk roses. One recalls the graveyard ritual of bereaved family members tossing a rose on the lid of a coffin about to be interred.
In conclusion, Catherine’s friends and associates are haunted by her death. They are also united in their regret that she had not been given more years to develop her talent, to enjoy her new home and garden, to relax and smell the roses. Her demise was painful and in her final days in the hospital, during brief periods of consciousness bracketted by weeks of coma, she was unable to speak, owing to a tracheal tube. There is a sense that she should have had more good days and been less burdened by sadness and anxiety. We remember the importance that she placed on being a very good artist and sustaining intimate relationships with a select few. If she couldn’t attain the very highest degree of achievement in these endeavors, Catherine had not really devised a plan B. Says Mark, "For her getting up in the morning to make art was the fundamental thing. When she couldn't get up and make art, that was the beginning of the end." Asking for help was not Catherine’s style,” Isabel says regretfully; “I always admired that she wasn’t willing to make compromises, but I was also scared that she was going to pay the price for the incredible sacrifices she made.” Most of us get the chance to do things over, to learn by our hardships and mistakes. But then most of us haven’t put our aspirations on the line in artworks that will testify long after memory blurs. Catherine Daigle’s art holds a distinctive and distinguished place in the annals of Toronto art and in the memories of those who knew and miss her.
Betty Ann Jordan is a Toronto art writer |
