Beverley Reid

catalogue introduction catalogue essay artist statement installation photos list of works

Catalogue Essay - copyright 2005 Roger Boulet

I. The Enclosed Garden

The first garden I remember from my visits to the Reid home at Christina Lake was primarily dedicated to vegetables and fruits. It was enclosed by a fence, essentially to protect the plants from roaming cattle, wandering deer and marauding bears. It had a raspberry patch, which was an extraordinary attraction to me, and from the beginning of my acquaintance with the Reids, the garden and the food it offered was a comfort to me. (Of course there was also Richard and Beverley, kindred spirits, whose dedication to art was a way of life.)

Was it nostalgia on my part? I remember my mother's gardens, especially one in suburban Winnipeg, which covered at least a quarter of an acre. There was no need for a fence around that garden. It was on a gradual slope some distance from the banks of the Red River. In the spring of 1948, the waters rose so high that planting was delayed until the waters receded and the soil was workable again. My mother remembered the garden and harvest that year as the best ever. In 1950, there was no garden. The flood that year forced us to evacuate and it was some time before the waters receded. Most of the summer was spent on repairs to the rented house. I found out later that the clapboard siding covered large logs. We lived in one of the oldest surviving houses in the area.

There was also a log house at Christina Lake where I stayed during those early visits back in the mid-1980s. Beverley and Richard Reid had introduced themselves to me when I was Director/Curator of the Burnaby Art Gallery, probably in about 1984 when they created the Grand Forks Art Gallery. The Burnaby Art Gallery lent some exhibitions and miscellaneous works of art to Grand Forks and it was these loans and their delivery that first caused me to enjoy the unparalleled hospitality of the Reids.

Over the years I would return often. Even when my partner and I lived in Edmonton, we would return for about a week in July, when the raspberries were ripe. It took about 12 hours to drive from Edmonton to Christina Lake. I made the drive at least twice a year and it is during those drives to Christina Lake that I resolved to return to British Columbia, more particularly to the interior. I could not imagine a better place to be.

I had other things in common with the Reids. I too had graduated from the University of Manitoba's School of Art, although some 15 years after they had been there. The School of Art in Winnipeg was the oldest art school in Western Canada. It became part of the University of Manitoba in 1950, and until the early 1960s, the school was housed in the old law courts building in downtown Winnipeg. By the time I went to the School, it had just moved into a new building on the Fort Garry campus of the University. I kept hearing from older students how regrettable that move was, and no doubt it was for a time. The School that Beverley and Richard attended from 1951 through 1956 was the much regretted one. The B.F.A. degree program caused an influx of newly accredited American teachers in various media with Master's degrees, most of them coming from the Midwestern schools of Chicago and Iowa. As a result, it was the figurative tradition that held sway at the school, while Abstract Expressionism was flourishing in New York.

The difference between the degree course and the diploma course was principally in the fact that the diploma course was intended to prepare one for a degree in commercial art or the design professions. Many of the classes were identical for both degree and diploma students, the latter being spared some of the academic requirements of the degree program.

There was still, however, an attitude on the part of the male professors that women would not become "artists." Beverley remembers a comment by William McCloy, the school's director, opining that most of the women enrolled were probably just looking for husbands. This attitude was similar to the attitude towards women artists in the Abstract Expressionist group in New York. In her book entitled Women, Art and Society, Whitney Chadwick quotes one critic reviewing the extraordinary work of Louise Nevelson in 1946, ultimately dismissing it: "We learned the artist was a woman in time to check our enthusiasm. … Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among the moderns." That attitude prevailed in Modernist circles for another two decades. Winnipeg was no exception.

Art school for a 16-year-old in Winnipeg was nonetheless a great distance from rural Saskatchewan where Beverley Williams grew up. She has a photograph of some farm buildings and can point to the large structure where she first witnessed a quilting bee. She still cherishes quilts made by her mother decades ago. The memory of a quilting bee is as vivid as the gardens of her childhood, where all nature of produce and berries grew. Even as a toddler, her mother would put her and her brother in a wagon and wheel them into the garden when she worked in it. Beverley remembers her first garden. She was six years old. It was a little backyard plot in Regina, maybe 10 by 10 feet, planted with whatever came to hand.

Beverley found high school difficult. Parental concern led Mr. and Mrs. Williams to seek an education better suited to their daughter's abilities. She was enrolled in the diploma program at School of Art in Winnipeg in 1951, at 16 the youngest student there. She did very well in her classes. She graduated 4 years later in 1956 having had a good grounding in drawing, painting and the elements of design.

At the School she had met Richard Reid, in the degree program one year ahead of her, and after her graduation and a brief stint working at Reimer Display Company in Winnipeg, she left with Richard for a year in San Miguel de Allende. She did not attend any courses at San Miguel, but did some painting, returning to Vancouver in June of 1957 where she was employed with the Walker Display Company. With that Company she was principally employed producing display props. Richard went back to work for a year with the Winnipeg brewing company where he had worked before graduation. He moved back to Vancouver in May or June of 1958.

Beverley married Richard on 27 February 1960. They left for Europe the next day, travelling in Europe and North Africa. What was originally intended as a one year trip stretched out to 1964 since Bev's designs for window displays were eagerly purchased by Harrods, Liberty, Jaegers and other stores. The fabrication of the fibreglass display props was done in a little greenhouse in a small enclosed garden space behind their rented flat on Avonmore Road in Kensington. The income from this little enterprise allowed for extensive travel and an extended stay abroad, where the Reids visited museums, galleries and gardens through Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Morocco.

Returning to the west coast of Canada in late June of 1964, the couple settled in Richmond where they built an addition to her parents' home. Beverley and Richard acquired a property of their own at Terra Nova in Richmond in 1969. She continued to produce 'decorative objects' in fibreglass until about 1975 when she determined that working in the medium was undermining her health. A large half-acre garden in Richmond, where vegetables, berries and fruit were grown, allowed some of the surplus produce to be sold to friends.

It was after the return to Canada that Beverley turned to quilting again. She says it began with the very practical need for a warm bed cover. She remembers that this seemed to be a natural thing to do. She had sewn since childhood. She had made much of her own clothing for many years and the tactile feel, the design and colour of fabrics appealed to her instinctively. For several years, she made a lot of quilts for beds, adding appliqué work of her own design. While not a part of the present exhibition, these quilts nonetheless represent an essential part of the path leading to the work represented in this 13 year survey. Some of these quilts are remarkable and innovative as well. One quilt, made from remnants of furs and totally impractical as a bedcover because of its weight, demonstrates an insatiable desire to extend the borders of the medium, as she found the traditional patterns and approaches of most quilt-making to be limited.

II. The Healing Garden

With the move to Christina Lake in 1979, and the work required to clear the land for houses and gardens, and living without electricity for 3 years, needlework was set aside for the most part. Besides, the definitive move to Christina Lake did not occur until 1981 when the Richmond house was sold. Her involvement with the founding of the Grand Forks Art Gallery in 1984 and her volunteer work for it stretched to 1989. These were five very full years, made all the more intense by the presence of her mother, now in declining health. Things seemed to reach some kind of crisis in about 1990. She realized that she had reached a "burn-out" level and began to withdraw from its identifiable causes, seeking some kind of renewal of energy.

She started painting again in 1990. And, on the advice of a friend, she took time out to attend a meditation course which somehow allowed her to focus on her life, her work and her relationships with people. She overcame a fear of speaking in public with the return of her self-confidence. And in 1992, she returned to quilt-making and to gardening, the former occupying her in the winter months, the latter in the summer months. The two activities, however, were not so neatly compartmentalized. No longer bed-covers, the quilts were meant to be seen as wall-hangings, like pictures in a gallery. The dominant subject of the new picture-quilts was the garden and the rhythm of the seasons, implied by titles such as Waiting for Spring (1992), Feeding Time (Summer) (1993), Breathing Hole (Winter) (1994) and First Frost (1997). Her interest in the late 19th century decorative paintings of Gustav Klimt, in Arts and Crafts design work, in other Art Nouveau inspired art work (such as the flower paintings of Tom Thomson) and the constant presence of botanical illustrations in gardening books, have inspired the bulk of the work, including a series of works on the Seven Deadly Plants done between 2000 and 2004, the series felicitously book-ended by designs based on the "sunflower" paintings of Gustav Klimt (1999) and Egon Schiele (2004).

It was in spring of 1993 that Beverley's mother Margaret entered Hardyview Lodge in Grand Forks. Rather than merely visiting her mother almost on a daily basis, Beverley began to volunteer at Hardyview, working in the front garden of the new facility. As a result of this major improvement, the facility administrator proposed to Beverley that a garden might also be created at the back of the facility for the lodge residents. This was a challenging opportunity and, characteristically, Beverley embarked on the project with much planning and research. The garden would be necessarily enclosed, but had to be accessible by wheel-chairs. The lodge housed many seniors afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease so Beverley's design was based on a circuit of a figure-8, and incorporated familiar vegetables and perennials, the soothing sound of falling water and the scents of shrubs, herbs and flowers. It was a very special healing garden which became a community endeavour through a Provincial government grant, donations of earth and plantings of every description, as well as a gazebo. It was a labour of love, not only for the love of gardening and its restorative powers, but as an expression of an abiding affection for her mother, who passed away on Christmas Day, 1996. The garden had been officially opened that summer. She continued to lead the maintenance of this garden until 2002.

The Hardyview garden was essentially derived, as far as its design is concerned, from the Arts and Crafts influenced gardens, such as those of the great British garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) who organized her plantings using a painterly approach for form and mass. Jekyll attributed her garden influence and success to the fact that she had physically worked in gardens for a long time thus gaining experience with plants, but also noting her early training in fine arts. She had attended the Kensington School of Art, essentially a school of art and design, meant to improve design standards in British industry. The Kensington curriculum was hugely influential in art schools, and the diploma course at the School of Art in Winnipeg retained its emphasis on design. It was practical training for design and commercial art. I mention Gertrude Jekyll in this context because she was fundamentally an artist who turned to gardening because of bad eye-sight, and she brought to the medium of gardening her training as a designer-artist. Beverley Reid approaches gardening as an artistic medium, although she is by no means foreign to practical considerations, such as food production and, in the case of Hardyview, the garden's inherent therapeutic properties.

III. The Garden Without Borders

I have before me in a history of gardening book an illustration of an old woodcut which represents a medieval garden in its enclosure. The text explains that in the dark ages and in wilder northern climes, such enclosures were a practical consideration, as indeed was the enclosure for that first garden at Christina Lake. The origin of these enclosed gardens may be traced to antiquity and the notion of the garden as an interior room, the Roman peristyle. If Medieval gardens were reminiscent of the gardens of the Middle-east, the main purpose of the garden was to provide delight and refreshment. Not unusually, the gardens featured a water element of some kind, such as small canals which irrigated the plantings, or a fountain. Water was also reminiscent of the notion of the sacred grove, often created in places where water sprang spontaneously from the ground, or where certain trees and curative plants grew.

The monastery gardens were often enclosed spaces and the monastic tradition was associated with gardening. St Benedict wanted monasteries to be self-sufficient and monks were encouraged to plant gardens of vegetables, fruit and medicinal or culinary herbs within the monastic compound. Thus gardening and employment in manual labour which allowed the mind to be contemplative was very much a part of monastic life based on the prescriptive ora et labora: "pray and work", associating the practice of contemplation and meditation with manual labour, thus ennobling ordinary and often menial work.

Popular medieval illustrations feature enclosed gardens where a lady could be seen amidst fruit trees and flowers, symbolizing fertility, but enclosed by virtue.

There were other feminine ideals in the Middle Ages. Since women could not own land (perhaps because they were themselves considered as property) it was through their associations with powerful or princely men that seemed to justify their existence, particularly if they could provide an heir to inherit the property. There being a shortage of powerful and princely men in any age, women found an alternative in the ultimate in virtuous living, the cloister and a life focused on things spiritual rather than things material. In the early Church, St. Jerome had recommended to women taking up the ascetic life to have some wool always on hand to keep themselves occupied by spinning and weaving. The monastic tradition was almost as old as the Church itself, and women such as Hildegard von Bingen became great figures of the Church. Joining a monastery or a nunnery provided a woman with access to learning. Yet temptation for women was ever present, hence the injunction to keep weaving and spinning.

The sacred and the profane come together in an extraordinary set of tapestries from about 1500 commonly known as the Lady and Unicorn, which celebrate the 5 senses. Significantly, the sixth tapestry in the series is entitled "A mon seul desir" (To my own desire) and ambiguously suggests that the virtuous woman either rejects the pleasures of the senses for a life of virtue and humility, or she may be accepting the gift of love. The tapestries have one thing in common, beyond the noble lady and the mythical unicorn: a mille fleurs background suggests a garden of beautiful flowers.

Western civilization's progress in terms of the emancipation of women, which happened in the same century as the abolition of slavery, is explained by the evolution of the role of women in society. In less prosaic terms, it seems to go along with men's perception of women's sexuality. The role of a woman in society was in the home where she was expected to manage the household while the man toiled at other occupations. The situation had evolved little since the Middle Ages. We have the images of idealized women protected and imprisoned within castellated walls. Their Crusader husbands have left to do battle and lay siege to other walled fortresses on the way to Jerusalem and their salvation. The "protected" woman's virtue remained intact and she became a model of fidelity.

Even before the Crusades, we have Queen Matilda at work embroidering the Bayeux Tapestry while her husband William invaded the English Kingdom which he conquered in 1066. A more ancient prototype of such images may be found in the Odyssey. Penelope waits for Ulysses for the 10 years of the Trojan War, and another 10 years of Ulysses' wanderings. Everyone thought Ulysses dead, and Penelope had many suitors. She kept them waiting by the promise to chose one of them when the cloth she was weaving to drape the tomb of Ulysses' father Laertes was complete. She kept unravelling at night what she had woven during the day. The never-complete task might as well be a metaphor for housework. Woman's work is never done.

Am I attaching too much significance to these myths and ancient ideas of the sacred? The most recent garden that Beverley designed is not enclosed. When I asked about its design and composition, she responded that her intent was to create a garden where the deer could roam through. The grasses selected and planted are not to their liking. And there is nothing in it for bears to eat. What is delightful here is that everything is for the pleasure of the eye: it is food for the spirit. Yet the garden is notable for a number of features which have ancient resonances. A stream runs through the garden in the spring and early summer. Carefully placed rocks are critical elements. The retaining wall is distanced from the main composition by a broad path of small stones, and the clumps of massed colourful grasses growing to specific heights, gently follows the natural slope of the land until indigenous grasses create a natural border, if there is one. The only hint of an enclosure is an architectural feature that is like the remnant of a wall, on which appear the stencilled words: carpe diem.

Behind these words, in much lighter and smaller type are the Latin names of many of the various grasses used in the garden which, she admits, are there as prompts when visiting horticulturalists and "plant folk" visit and inquire about specific genera or species.

She mentions that this most recent garden was created under the influence of the work of landscape architects such as James Van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme (Oehme, van Sweden and Associates, Inc.) who represent an approach to gardening which has been called the New American Garden. Characteristically, this style emphasizes the use of more indigenous plants and is less reliant on the intervention of pesticides and irrigation. Another influence is Piet Oudolf whose garden designs have been referred to as a gardening New Wave. Typically, Beverley's approach to gardening remains eclectic, that is to say she relies on her intuition formed by the landscape at hand, and practical considerations of time and ability. Her mammoth efforts in the garden have resulted in various ailments including chronic back pain and a broken foot. She will be 70 in February of 2006.

In 2001, Beverley began a work, Reclaimed Land, which was essentially a landscape done with fabric. While it may represent the reclaiming of land by a human hand, it could also represent the reclamation of cultivated land by nature. Its abstract qualities, however, seem to come to the fore, and this precarious balance between subject matter and abstraction is really the beginning of the most recent series of works, after she had finished with the marvellous series of the Seven Deadly Plants series. Another work, The Journey (2003-2005), where the foreground elements escape the rectangular format, including a poppy and its playfully dangling stem.

More recent works tend to reveal abiding interests in the earth and its beauty, particularly in rocks. Not quite coincidentally, this springs from her interest in the earth?specifically in rocks and their formations. She cites another influence as that of illustrated books on rocks and minerals. On my last visit to Christina Lake in July of 2005, I took a photograph of a collection of rocks in a shallow basin beside the main walkway to the house. Like eggs in a nest, I was reminded of the essential presence of rocks in many garden designs.

Rocks have therefore figured largely in many of her recent works where she has come to some kind of hybrid medium where collage is the approach, and the media encompass forms cut out of fabrics, enhanced by sewn stitches, and drawn elements. These extraordinary pieces are essentially abstract and seem to suggest meditations on rocks that express the natural forces that created them. Within this series, a fossilized fish is the most literal subject. Curiously, these works are uncomfortable within the borders of frames, challenging the very convention of the picture within which they were conceived-cloth paintings where the "painted" elements are the result of various processes of bleaching and altering the colours of purchased fabrics. A full range of descriptive textures is made possible by every conceivable device in the quilt-maker's repertoire. Beyond the staggering amount of detail that is suggested or represented, there lies the rock and the record of the forces and processes that created it.

I return to The Journey. The path opens before the artist leading beyond gate-like formations of a canyon, curiously made immaterial by the landscape elements that construct it. A grand valley appears beyond these walls breached by the forces of nature. Others walls have been breached. There are no more barriers between craft and art. These are rendered meaningless by the essential organization of mind over material, over matter, which is characteristic of the human species. It is the capacity to aspire to an altered state based on the contemplation of living things that grow, that decay and, in a spring that always returns, are reborn in a never-ending cycle. We are a small and insignificant part in that cycle. At least, we have the capacity to contemplate this ever-unfolding mystery, an ultimate design that we are yet unable to fully fathom.

Roger Boulet
Summerland, BC
17 August 2005

http://members.shaw.ca/rhboulet