She Shells
Lisa DiQuinzio and Heather Goodchild – 2017
“She shells considers how sifting and unearthing is integral to the creative process and how the objects and spaces that surround us impact our state of being through many emotional and cognitive layers.”
Mary Anning (1799 – 1847) began hunting for fossils along the Jurassic coast of England as a child. The money she and her brother made selling these fossils to tourists provided needed support for her family. Anning went on to make important discoveries in the field of palaeontology (including the Plesiosaur, a proposed identity for the Loch Ness monster) but today her best-known legacy is the tongue twister “She sells sea shells by the sea shore” that was penned in her remembrance in 1908.
Mary Anning’s story has faded from public consciousness and only through investigation is she unearthed. She shells at Modern Fuel considers how sifting and unearthing is integral to the creative process and how the objects and spaces that surround us impact our state of being through many emotional and cognitive layers.
By employing painting, textile and sculptural work, and an intuitive process of making, DiQuinzio and Goodchild explore the cultural and psychological implications in the consideration of exterior and interior spaces. An image cannot replace intuition, but moving freely from abstraction to representation can make space for intuition to be seized. The purpose here is to evoke embodied responses that lead to expanded ideas about the objects and spaces around us; how they affect us in our day-to-day lives, the emotional responses they can elicit and the stories they can absorb and reveal.
About the Artists
Lisa DiQuinzio, Heather Goodchild—
Lisa DiQuinzio’s work is process-based and seeks to develop a relationship between objects, both created and found. As a painter, she works with oil, acrylic and water-colour, as well as integrating fabric, mirrors, wax and ready-mades. She explores the limits of these materials by working and reworking them into compositions that illustrate the shifting perspectives of objects and space. She most recently exhibited at G Gallery and ESP Gallery in Toronto.
Heather Goodchild employs textile techniques such as rug-hooking, screen printing and quilting, in conjunction with installation, sculpture and painting to create scenarios that mine the past to decode the present. She explores ideas around the value of work and ritual in relation to the well-being of individuals and society. She most recently exhibited at Mulherin in Toronto, Eastern Edge in St John’s NF, the Textile Museum of Canada in 2013 and was the artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2012. The artists would like to acknowledge support from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts in realizing this exhibition.