It was 1974, I was pregnant and suffused with the peace & contentment that I suspect is The Great Creator’s way of ensuring women are willing to undergo birth.  I was in my fourth & final year at the Vancouver School of Art and joyfully producing a plethora of pregnant forms.  My work was as round, expansive and shiny as my belly. I was fascinated with eggy shapes and anything to do with eggs. Love and life was good.

Broken Yolk, 1974, Marion-Lea Jamieson, molded Sheet Acrylic, 36”h x 48” w x 30”d

I had just discovered how to take photos & had borrowed a camera from the Art School.  The Egg Boxes were photographed in a number of configurations and locations. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned to ensure that the lens was clean.

I also choreographed & performed a couple of dance pieces during this period.  The first was called Egg-Hanger, a dance piece for 6 dancers that I choreographed and was performed at the Simon Fraser University Theatre under the direction of Iris Garland. Though I don’t have a visual record of the piece being performed, I have images of the sculpture that I made for that dance:

The photo above was taken at the New Era Social Club, an artists’ studio on Powell Street.  Other artists working there at the time included Glen Lewis, Dave Rimmer, Taki Bluesinger & Chris Dahl.

 I choreographed & performed a solo dance piece when I was about 8 months pregnant in the dance space of the Western Front Artists’ Collective in Vancouver, as part of a performance directed by Linda Rubin.

Called Amnion the piece began with me inside a large clear polyester sac that I had made with a large zipper that allowed entry & exit. The dance, was done inside the sac and in front of a large blue heart, to the accompaniment of thumping music. The piece ended in a symbolic birth with my emergence from the sac clad in flesh coloured leotard & tights

During the pregnancy I continued to create images of the fecund female body with an interest in exploring the, to me, interesting paradox that the female body is celebrated for it’s sexuality while, in the West, its amazing reproductive capability is almost an embarrassment. My theory is that reproduction is an instinctual process that unequivocally links humans to their mammalian natures and belies the assumption of our species’ separateness & superiority.

While still at art school in 1974, I created a series of sculptures using vacuum-formed sheet acrylic in the shape of a heart using the Vancouver School of Art’s fabulous Thermoplastics studio. This studio was amazing as it had a giant oven capable of hanging a 6′ x 8′ sheet of acrylic that could be heated, then formed.  For this there was a giant vacuum-form press where the heated acrylic could be either sucked onto a mold through the vacuum function or the direction of the airflow could be reversed so that the hot acrylic could be blown through a cut-out. I used heart-shaped cut-out to create 3 big acrylic hearts, 4′ x 4′, with a circular fluorescent light fixture inside. The blue heart was used in the Western Front performance. Sadly, the entire Thermoplastics studio was not moved the the School’s new campus on Granville Island that eventually morphed into the Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

Below are some other photos of the big blown acrylic hearts. A big heart shape was cut out of 3/4″ plywood and clamped over a sheet of hot acrylic.  Then the air was forced through the cut out & the heart shape bubbled into life.

I also played around with vacuum-formed female torsos in the form of heart-shaped boxes. As a pregnant woman I was interested in the concept of vessels – of things within things. These vacuum-formed acrylic, heart-shaped torso boxes were filled with various items and photographed in a number of locations & juxtapositions.

 As part of the heart-shaped container series, there was a series of heart-shaped boxes. Like the torsos, these were photographed filled with various objects;

There was a heart shaped, drop leaf table that was part of a series of red-painted wooden sculptures. These included Egg-Hanger, shown above and a piece called Brass Stand at right. Though Brass Stand was not strictly speaking a part of the pregnancy-inspired “hearts & eggs” series, it is included as it was part of the red-paint that seemed to be an important aspect of my work at the time.

Brass Stand was part of a project grant received from the Vancouver School of Art that allowed the recipient to explore beyond the capabilities of the Art School. Recipients were encouraged to pay outside trades to create all or part of the artwork. I choose to explore the potential for spun brass, and created a wooden mold to be used to form the brass. I then approached a metalwork shop and asked them to recreate the wooden forms in brass. The guys in this metalwork shop couldn’t figure out what I was doing there and why I was asking them for such outlandish work. A couple of them figured I was there because I was looking to get laid, and became so unpleasant that I was afraid to go back and pick up the remaining work. I was shy & unsure of myself at that stage and like most women of that time, blamed myself for creating the unwanted attention.

My beautiful baby girl was born soon after I graduated from art school. The birth was difficult, and I came home to an empty, ground floor apartment with no money and no help. I collected welfare and wandered around a dank apartment with no furniture, carrying my baby, with both of us weeping for the first three months.  I hadn’t really foreseen that as a penniless female artist, I would not have the leisure or resources to create artworks once I was a mother.  The isolation was also a shock as artist friends came by, saw that I was no fun and didn’t return. They couldn’t understand why I had done this to myself. But I knew why. I fell in love with that baby and have never fallen out of love with her, or the next baby, who came along 6 years later.

The first three months were the hardest and the paintings I did, shown below, were the only works created during that time. They were exhibited in a gallery in Chinatown specially set up to show the work of artists on welfare (those were the days).

Six years later, I had a second baby, my son James, even though the marriage was shaky and we were no better off financially. I often say that having my two children was the smartest move I ever made.

Many years later, my second husband Colin, my children and grandchildren and his children & grandchildren are the greatest blessings of my life and I thank the Creator for having given me the wisdom to choose love and life over good sense.

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A. S. Byatt’s last book of short stories, Medusa’s Ankles, was a joy to read after having waded through a slew of glib novels by young writers seeking to take liberties with the form without having mastered it to begin with. The introduction to Byatt’s book is written by David Mitchell who describes the author as an art historian whose scholarly knowledge of art informs her prose. He says her characters act as conduits for ideas about making art, looking at art and art’s centrality to the mind and the world. For instance she incorporates ideas from John Ruskin “…from whom art lecturers claim professional descent“.

Few writers, Mitchell says, embed theory in their fiction with Byatt’s boldness and success, with theories of art illustrated by the stories that house them. He uses the word “Ekphrasis” which describes a work of visual art used as a literary device. I’m delighted by the revelation that there is a word for an area I’ve been trying to talk about in the halting prose of a non-writer. But Byatt’s prose “bestows dignity upon art in all its manifestations.”

In the short story, Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary, she has the character Valasquez say, “the world is full of light and life and the true crime is not to be interested in it“.  That’s an interesting idea – artists are simply those people interested enough in light and life to devote their lives to translating it into a visual, literary or some other communicable form.

One of the collection’s outstanding stories  is “A Lamia in the Cevennes” in which an artist with a creative block falls in love, not with a mythological seductress, but with art itself. 

As in all her stories, this one is in constant dialogue with the readers, asking, What is art? Why do we need it? What does it do for us? The protagonist, Bernard, asks, “Why bother? Why does this matter so much? What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again? I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not.” “Art is a mercurial lover” says Mitchell in the Introduction. “The artists can no more ignore their art than a character can change the story they appear in, or a Greek hero outwit the fates.”

There are many other authors who wrestle with the point of making art. In his novel, Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes asks,”Is art a depiction of reality, a concentration of it, a superior substitute for it, or just a beguiling irrelevance?” In the case of a novel, it is easier to understand how the writer, an expert at communicating in language, can help readers to make sense of the world, to understand it and our place in it. But what about the writers’ or artists’ larger responsibilities to society as a whole? Whether a writer, or any artist must directly address and take a strong position on political developments in his/her country is explored at some length and with great delicacy by Colm Toibin in his novel about the life of Thomas Mann, The Magician. In the novel, Mann (and Toibin) concludes that artists are damned if they do or don’t take a political stand and by extension, suggests that an artist’s first and primary responsibility is to his/her work. He also concludes that barbarism is never far beneath the surface and that art is always the first of its victims. So artists keep alive a sense of grace and beauty that balances violence and brutality.

These great artists insist that creating artworks is a balance to violence, help us see and make sense of the world and I am grateful that they have defended making art for art’s sake. Thanks Antonia, Julian, Colm, Thomas and all the rest.

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