Portrait of the Artist as a Pink Figure
Essay by Sheila Stevenson

On a summer’s day in 1976, Suzanne Swannie appeared at the Nova Scotia Designer Craftsmen office in Halifax to introduce herself and to show me some work. She was a weaver, moving to Nova Scotia from Newfoundland, originally from Denmark. She had place mats and table runners. They excited my hand and my eye--linen fibre and such interesting use of colour--my first real-life encounter with authentic Scandinavian design! “Imagine a dinner table with these,” I thought.

This retrospective exhibition offers us the chance to see what Suzanne has wrought since then. Beautifully made functional items, such as scarves, household fabrics, and carpets, delight our senses with their choice fibres and exquisite colour harmonies. A range of pictorial tapestries treat the eye and engage the imagination. Drawings and Repassage, the ‘fine art’ works, transcend the pragmatic but are grounded in the use of thread, the repetitive and modular structure of weaving, and the drawing-to-weaving interplay that make up tapestry design. The two Mi’kmaw pieces represent Suzanne’s work as a designer and collaborator, but also as a teacher. The linen damask tablecloth is here because it was woven forty-five years ago on a jacquard loom in Sollerod, Denmark by the apprentice Suzanne, as her examination to achieve journeyman status.

The works in this retrospective indicate the way in which Suzanne’s life and career have unfolded. Seen as a body spanning several decades, the work reflects her mastery of several weaving techniques, her training as a designer, her need for a co-resolution of aesthetic and technical issues, her studio conditions, her sense of humour, an acute awareness of her physical and social environments, her unending creativity, her need for beauty, her Danish-Canadian culture, and the imperative to make a satisfactory living for herself and two daughters.

A child of activist anti-Nazi parents in occupied wartime Copenhagen, Suzanne remembers the 1950s in Denmark as a period of optimism and development. She was able to make whatever she wanted in day-time programs in the Tivoli Gardens, using the materials provided. She painted theatre sets and made her own clothes as an adolescent. She wanted to apprentice with the silversmith, Georg Jensen. But there were no female apprentices at Georg Jensen, so at age eighteen, she started her 6000-hour studio apprenticeship with the weavers John and Kirsten Becker, an hour’s ride by tram, train, and bus from her home next to the royal palace in central Copenhagen.

Suzanne kept a daily journal of her activity in the Becker studio, “one line for every day, to say what I was doing. At the beginning I threaded a lot of heddles, and worked on a commission for the renowned designer, Arne Jacobsen.” The sample book in which she kept this record also contains fabrics that Suzanne and her fellow apprentices wove. The Becker studio was the largest and best equipped in the country, and included large carpet looms, multi-harness looms, Jacquard looms, and draw looms reconstructed from the ancient Persian type that enabled the weaving of very complex patterned weaves. For three years, Suzanne spent eight-hour days throwing a shuttle on one kind of loom or another and two nights a week learning drafting and design. “As a result”, she says, “I was committed to making work from fibre; disciplined to work in three dimensions with this particular material, and not in any other. Thread is my second language.”

From 1963 to 1965, Suzanne expanded her knowledge in the design and technology program at the unique Textilinstitutet in Boräs, Sweden. (One of the few similar programs in North America is The Philadelphia Textile Institute.) She learned what the equipment could do and how to ‘write’ for industrial production in the disciplines of weaving, printing, and knitting. The training in this program focused on formal issues. In the year following her graduation, Textilinstitutet honoured Suzanne with her first serious commission.

I tend to look at the Danish part of Suzanne’s life as the setting up of the warp. What comes next is the filling in with the Canadian part, the weft. Suzanne left Denmark in 1967, for Cornerbrook, Newfoundland and Labrador, with a two-year contract to set up a weaving department. She came with tremendous knowledge and youthful energy to teach a range of students that included a Sorbonne graduate, Helly Greenacre, and the arts advocate, Megan Williams. She says that Helly translated when the Newfoundlanders and Suzanne couldn’t understand each other’s English!

After taking on married life, a series of houses in Spain, Dublin, and Cornerbrook, and two daughters, Maja (born in 1969) and Marta (born in 1971), Suzanne moved to Halifax in 1976 as a single mother. Having come from Denmark, “a welfare state where things were pretty easy and not too challenging”, her creativity and work ethic were put to the test in the Canadian environment. The move marked the beginning of an intensely productive period. While creating a nurturing environment for the girls, Suzanne worked as a designer, teacher, and producer of domestic textiles and little tapestries in her Coburg Road home.

The Small Tapestries series, including the triptych Childhood Song (1976), came out of this period. Evoking Suzanne’s childhood culture, these figurative tapestries were inspired by the awareness that her daughters were growing up in “a different culture”, a culture whose differences can still surprise Suzanne to this day. In the 1978 tapestry series, Pink Moods, she introduces a sprightly female nude that I call ‘Pink Figure’. Suzanne created her as a statement of independence, and an expression of her particular identity and cultural difference. “I grew up in the land of Hans Christian Andersen, whose stories are a weird sort of fantasy”, says Suzanne. “And the public parks in Copenhagen are filled with nude sculptures. I couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t seeing naked statues in Canadian parks!”

During the 1970s and 1980s, no woman artist in Nova Scotia escaped the notice of Mary Sparling, then Director at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery. Mary was tireless in her mission to recognize, promote, and celebrate women and their art practices. Being the fabulous connector that she was, she continually matched up people and opportunity. In Suzanne’s case, Mary as consultant matched Suzanne as designer, in the summer of 1978, with Eskasoni community leader Margaret Johnson, well known for her skills in Mi’kmaw basketry and beadwork. They would work with an intergenerational group of women to produce five appliquéd silk hangings and two woven splint panels for installation in the Cape Breton community’s new school. In the March 1979 NSDC Newsletter, Margaret Johnson said of the experience, “I couldn’t have done them without Suzanne. …We could get together and do more.” They did, and the results are in a number of public collections.

While completing an MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Suzanne did as the rest of the Romans there were doing, and played in a conceptual way with what she calls “the drawing part of the tapestry technique”. In 1985 she exhibited at Dalhousie University Art Gallery “a large body of ephemeral work called Drawings, [in which she created] progressive patterns by manipulating paper and thread and organza, drawing threads out of the fabric to make a mark”. During the MFA period, Suzanne says, “I went from design to fine arts, from the pragmatic to the ethereal and spiritual.” She very aptly describes her 1985 graduate installation, Repassage, as “a fine art work about craft.”
The sculpture commissioned in 1989 for installation in the octagonal stairwell in the E. Margaret Fulton Communications Center at Mount Saint Vincent University, is related in its progressive patterning to Repassage, as well as to the tetrahedral kites of Alexander Graham Bell. Suzanne, based in St John’s by this time, collaborated with Halifax artist, Andrew Terris on this project. They worked together on the model. Andrew then did the soldering and construction of the frame, Suzanne took on the fabric component.

Suzanne had moved with Marta to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1987, to work in St John’s as a full-time instructor in design, weaving, textile printing and dyeing, as well as developing curriculum at what became Cabot College. It was in Newfoundland that ‘Pink Figure’ reappeared in a small series of printed cards. This time (ca.1993-96), Suzanne was once more feeling her independence; the girls were well on their way to being self-supporting and successful. Both Maja and Marta graduated with a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: Maja in 1991 in photography, Marta in visual communications in 1993.
In 1996, Suzanne went to Malaysia as guest lecturer and artist-in-residence at the Institut Teknologi School of Art and Design. She designed, and produced a clever and complicated, yet practical and ephemeral, paper dress pattern piece to take with her to Malaysia for exhibition. Considering Two Small Forms: For Maja and Marta was a layered, wall-mounted construction that retraced the physical growth of each of her daughters.

When the textile program at Cabot College was threatened with closure in 1997, Suzanne returned to Halifax. She obtained a commodious, bright, and welcoming studio space at the city-owned Bloomfield Centre on Agricola Street, with running water and sinks for dyeing and washing. She went into the business of producing carpets on commission and for exhibition. Her experience bears out that the kind of work you do depends on the kind of studio you have. The Bloomfield studio was the only large and light-filled non-domestic space that Suzanne has had. There was room for supplies and apprentices and students and friends. And it was a place of great productivity, a 1990s Halifax, Nova Scotia version of the Becker Studio—with fewer apprentices and looms, but a proper weaving studio nevertheless!

After teaching in the Canadian Arctic in 1997, Suzanne designed and produced a group of carpets inspired by walks in the Arctic, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia. “Woven colour field painting. Looking down at landscape. I make what the painters make, but differently.” Always for her the question is, “I can draw it, but can I weave it?” How she wove what she saw in the Sanikiluaq, Belcher Islands landscape as she walked looking down, is the carpet triptych, Igneous II, using a simplified tapestry technique. Also woven within this carpet are her fond memories of the Inuit women with whom she worked and taught. “They took to the loom immediately,” says Suzanne. “They understood it instantly.”

To clarify how she does what the painters do, she explains, “I put my work in a long context, a tradition. It’s the same technique used by [the painter] Raphael”, [when the Renaissance Pope, Leo X commissioned tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Palace.] The tapestry technique has two parts: a drawing part and a textile part.” Raphael did the drawings (called cartoons) that the Flemish weavers would reproduce as fabric. Suzanne always starts by drawing what she wants to weave. Then she uses her thread language to turn the drawing into a textile. “I need a pretty good plan to start”, Suzanne says. “But I must always make changes along the way, adding things.”

During the Bloomfield studio period, Suzanne was also creating a portfolio of carpet designs for industrial production, having had little opportunity to practice as an industrial designer in Canada. Brud I Red, and Brud II Green (2004) are colour variants of the same carpet design, having been worked out as Paper Studies (2003) first.

Then it all came to a halt one day in August of 2005, when the artists were evicted from their studios overnight by the Halifax Regional Municipality. Goodbye to the space, the light, the highly suitable workplace for a reasonable rent -- so yes, goodbye to the big looms.

What came next was like an act of faith. The 90-by-300-centimetre tapestry, Triptych for Micah, is the most recent in a fascinating sequence of tapestries by this major textile artist. It is a family portrait celebrating the arrival of her first grandson, and also a metaphor. Losing the Bloomfield studio was a big disruption in the weft of Suzanne’s Canadian life. But a tapestry is the result of disrupting a weft and making shapes across that broken weft. In this instance Suzanne set up a loom in her house, and shaped another tangible expression of identity. Over the course of a year, all she could see of the piece was the narrow band before her that she was filling in, guided by the cartoon pinned to the warp. She was using what’s known as a low-warp technique, meaning “you roll whatever you have woven out of sight as you progress. All you ever see is the little strip in front of you. You never know what the thing is looking like. And it’s so slow to weave. That’s what makes it so exciting to finish,” Suzanne says with a laugh.

Remember that she wanted to apprentice with the silversmith Georg Jenson? What she learned instead was the language of thread, the material with which she has created the gem-like and sensuous works in Danish Modern: Suzanne Swannie Textil.

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