what i'm doing
My messy workspace, which only gets messier as I try new techniques and mediums. Eventually I'll realize I can't work within a single square inch and tidy up before starting to make a mess all over again
Heirloom: The Past And The Girl
Several years ago I fell in love with photos. Not just taking photos but handling photos, editing photos, looking for photos. This was a big part of my former newspaper and magazine career as a graphic artist, designer and art director. When Covid arrived in 2020, I considered myself a painter but fear of what was happening to the world made me freeze in front of any canvas. Instead, the need to have any sort of contact with people made me sit down at my work table and make small collages, small enough to mail to people I love. These became what I call my Pandemic Postcard series. I also discovered that I was happier when I was working with photographs. Covid taught me that I was a collage artist.
I'd always also had an interest in my family's history. My father and I would sit at his kitchen table for hours while he told me stories of his childhood in the north end of Winnipeg, living with his mother's immigrant family. They were Jews who escaped pogroms in the Russian Empire and sailed to Canada a few decades earlier. Dad's stories intrigued me and I began to research the backgrounds of my Baba's family, the Malcoves. Dad still told me stories but now I could start him talking by bringing him information about our family that at times he hadn't known, or copies of documents that he'd not seen before.
The amount of hours I've spent doing research on this laptop numbers in the hundreds, never mind the amount of tabs that I keep open while I chase the past
Panels of family history in progress
The more material I found, the more the Malcoves became a part of my life. They weren't just dusty photos in a box anymore. As the stacks of online and analog ephemera grew, I realized I wanted to take all I'd learned about these incredible people and bring them back to life with my artwork. I had wanted to start using collage to tell stories of history and forgotten people and artifacts, to step outside of my usual process and style and give a new historical perspective to my art.
Working on a collage of my great-great-grandmother, Chaya Sarah, taken in their shtetl in what is now Belarus
Experimenting with bits found in my father's garage, various mediums and a 1917 photo of my godmother, great-aunt Trudy
My goal is for these collages to bring back to life this colourful part of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora, the lives of those who fled persecution to become a part of Canadian history.
Heirloom: The Past And The Girl will be the first chapter of an ongoing historical series. The source material for these works comes from my many years of genealogical research, Dad's family stories and vintage photographs and letters. The series will have an intensely personal atmosphere. I was able to spend time as a child with a few of the Malcove siblings and then they were gone, like they were a dream for all those years between then and now. I’m the girl in The Past And The Girl – these people are my past and my present. I see their faces in mine more than a century later. They are a family possession, an heirloom that I have inherited, a present that I continue to open. This series will open up my art practice to work with archives and to allow me to use collage as a visual and historic learning tool.
A portrait of my great-aunt Lillian with her mother, my great-grandmother Leah, circa 1918
I lost my dear Papa in February of this year. He had become very ill and wasn't able to talk much anymore about his memories or listen to my newest family discoveries. When he passed away, I became the keeper of the family archives. My siblings and I have discovered many more boxes of photos, many more personal items that belonged to the Malcoves these past few months. All this new material I didn't know existed, the amount of research still to be done, the necessity of visiting archives in person to dig deeper. Every find brings forth new questions that demand answers. But this series is worth every second I spend on it. It's no longer a tribute to my ancestors – it's a tribute to a man who dearly loved his family. This one's for you, Papa.