mary collier fleet

Dates: March 6th - March 20th

I once took my three year old nephew to an art gallery. In an exhibit full of hyper-realism he dropped to the floor and feigned snoring. A tall elegant lady who was following behind us, nodded and said, Exactly. Then we entered a room with Picasso, Miro, Klee and my nephew went berserk. He ran in circles, hooting and laughing and then ran straight to the large Picasso painting and slapped it. The tall elegant lady had a big smile on her face. The security guard did not. After we were escorted out, I thought, Picasso might have been pleased with my nephew’s response, if Picasso needed to be pleased, which probably he didn’t. Still. Children are my favourite critics.

This exhibit is with them in mind but also is a celebration of the imagination and its peculiarities and how much we need our imaginations right now and a desire to make art that is interactive and not exclusionary.

When the pandemic hit, I felt discouraged. I don’t know what to do, I told my daughter. Stock pile, she said. So, I whittled, wrote, sewed, knitted, tufted, painted, patterned, made collages of sorts from paper, wood, canvas. I adopted the method Frank Zappa used when composing music and set myself up in a corral of tables, moving to the next project whenever I stalled.

Sometimes all you need is permission. All the ideas held back by common sense tumbled forward. Everything in the house seemed to have creative potential. The 1908 organ too heavy to move was dismantled. The keys made into a clown army. I started looking at every piece of wood differently. And then the idea for the large shadow dog arrived. A large black dog with shelves to hold miscellaneous patterned blocks of wood to arrange and arrange and arrange. It felt like capturing the overwhelm we feel from our world right now and giving it form.

People started giving me scraps of wood, spindles, chair backs. I visited the shops of a few woodworkers. I’ll have that. I said as I put scraps from their burn bins into my pocket, (quoting Burglar Bill).

And then someone suggested I do a show. What could you call it?

Holus bolus, immediately came to mind. It means all at once. As in, Don’t eat those cookies holus bolus.

Permission to create is one thing: a destination for the work another. And for this I am grateful to the Saint John Arts Centre and Executive Director Andi Emrich, Education and Outreach Coordinator Rosella Mullin for getting this exhibition over the bumps of a renovation delay. 

I once lived in a town where Art was mayor. Art was blind in one eye and had one leg shorter than the other. He drove an old Cadillac, careening along the back roads, spitting gravel. Art was a menace. Art was dangerous. No one said anything though because of Art’s afflictions. Art’s wild ways were understandable. Still. I can say truthfully  that Art and art almost killed me a number of times.

I persisted. I was born a maker.

And although I have taken the circuitous route to my original intent I like how it has shaped my thinking and made me a bit feisty about definitions of, say, success. If you’ve reached this point, you’re asking, how is this a bio?

Here you go:

• born on the shortest darkest day of the year in Toronto general hospital.  
• have three brothers so learned to both blend in and fight
• art school drop-out (for feminist reasons)
• lived on Vancouver Island for four years and when asked if I was going to stay, said, I don’t know, I always liked New Brunswick
• journalism compensation degree aka be practical, they said. (Ottawa)
• married an egg-head
• birthed two magnificent creative beautiful beasts
• moved to an old church in Renforth, NB carting along the ashes of fourth generation Saint John born, Bill, our large shaggy dog Zorg and guinea pigs Coco and Beaver – fun fact guinea pigs can live to be 15
• back to making and trying to stay warm.
• listed as an artist to watch in East magazine by Sarah Jones
• a few exhibits:

Finalist and winner at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy. My illustrations for the Italo Calvino celebration toured 17 countries in a group show

• confidence gained from international assessment
• make make make
• mess mess mess
• getting a puppy on Saturday

Regrets: being too afraid to have dinner with Edward Albee when I realized it was just me and Riduan Tomkins and Edward Albee so I stood outside the house with my bottle of wine hoping they would see me and pull me from my fear. They didn’t. I stood up Edward Albee.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Probably me.

mary collier fleet