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Review: Barbara Heller: The Beauty of Bones

By Ruth Jones

The work of Barbara Heller was on exhibit at Elliott Louis Gallery in Vancouver in May 2009. This one-woman show was laid out under the intelligent curatorial direction of Ted Lederer. It was, as a whole, a tribute to the artist's career and remarkable productivity with many new and powerful tapestries included.

I was fortunate to view the exhibit on a day when Heller was touring a group of admirers through the gallery. I took the opportunity to ask her a few questions, especially about the inspiration for recent work.

She has been weaving images of dead birds for much of her career. When I first encountered them, I remember being puzzled by the artist's intention and slightly depressed by their appearance. My father is an ornithologist, and I recall as a child having the same feeling around the dead carcasses he would prepare for use as scientific specimens.

This current exhibit was a breakthrough viewing for me. Heller explained that the series began when her cat killed a bird and, distressed, she asked "how do I help its spirit back?" Since then, she employs the bird image as spirit conduit between this world and the next, and between the past and the present. In Heller's self published booklet, Cover Ups and
More Revelations, Christine Laffer has written eloquently on three previous works in the evolving bird series: the WAR ZONES TRIPTYCH, RWANDA, BOSNIA and SOMALIA, that operate as lament and mediation for politically based human destruction1. I will focus here on one of three new weavings in the series- HERALD, PATRIOT and SHAMAN. Each of these powerful stand-alone works was accompanied by a poem, written by the artist's husband Michael, which invites the viewer to practice remembrance of death as an aid to awakening consciousness.

At 50" x 32", SHAMAN is a large and powerful image of a seagull skeleton as foreground. The background has a double or coarser warp sett woven of thick handspun wool in variegated blue. It has all the springy bulbous quality of her trademark skeins of hand-dyed wool that she has spun and sold in her studio for 30 years. Interwoven with this are finer threads describing the delicate shapes of bones and of tattered feathers that form the carcass. It hovers as if in mid-air. Though seagulls are primarily scavengers, there is a sense of a bird of prey, due to the accentuated sharp beak and raised talons. This tapestry is to be part of a juried exhibition of the Canadian craft community in South Korea during the summer of 2009.

Birds are some of the best weavers in nature, and birds of prey are the master-carpeters of the bird world, with the largest eagle nests measuring 12 feet across and weighing several tons. I cannot help but make a connection between Heller's compassionate honoring the remains of birds, with an inquiry into the nature of her own mortality. She
seems to address the role of craft and art in mitigating the dissolution of the artist's physical existence, each work serving both as memorial and memento mori.

Tapestry is known for its susceptibility to rot and both accidental and intentional fires. Not only we the artists but also our works must eventually succumb to entropy. There are historical accounts of massive sets of weavings in royal collections being melted down during times of war to extract gold and silver thread content. The extrusions paid for the arming of troops. Heller's tapestries of dead birds evoke transformation on many levels- the death of the birds they portray, their transmogrification as weavers, the artist's and our individual deaths and the precarious existence of work made from wool and string. By weaving strands of eternity into the inevitability of physical decay, they invite the viewer towards liberation from ego and fear of dying. I congratulate Heller for her capacity to embody the sacred by communicating death as a visceral/spiritual release.

Another wonderful new series in the exhibit drew on concepts of physical remains as enshrined within artworks. Heller translated her encounter with relics of Christian saints into designs that investigate the transformation of material culture. Her central motif is the holy arm bone enshrined within a jewel-encrusted effigy of a hand and arm. She named this edition FUTURE RELIQUARIES.

 

There is an unrehearsed immediacy to the execution of these works as a whole, and I was thrilled that she has approached the topic in a spirit of experimentation and play. I felt the mark of a mature artist pleasing herself foremost. In each tapestry, she placed the hand symbol as focus, woven in rayon and metal foil with regular slits to suggest jewels. A hand represents the sacred source of all craft and the originator of our digital counting system (from fingers to piles of stones to abacus). Through both the weaving and the accounting streams, the hand is alma mater of the World Wide Web, which "is about anything being potentially connected to anything..., bring(ing) the workings of our own minds." (Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. London Orion Business 1999)

 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher active in the middle decades of the 20th century who believed that all we think is only made possible through our bodily experience, and that touch is the supreme teacher of reality. He heralded the body as our greatest tacher, as offering the formula for our ideas. His aims seem to prepare the path for Heller's exultation of the hand. (Judith Butler: "Merleau-Ponty and the touch of Malebranche" in the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty)
 

Her looming portrayal of the familial link between craft and computer is delightful, our tapestry medium commenting on itself. Weaving is the binary beginning of a technology that has enlarged our capacity to learn, calculate and communicate, and to store all these
advances. While commenting on this series, she pointed to her posted artist statement and said she had rewritten it, since the show opened, to accommodate the fact that most people do not know that our workaday computer originated from the jacquard loom. 

 

Richard Sennett's book The Craftsman is a result of meditation on the domain of the hand. Sennett voices concern that the objects of human production are often debased by sociologists under the term "Material culture" which: at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions- the thing itself is discounted.

 

Heller, by weaving her ideas into a visual 'compare-and-contrast' map of the physical patterning of decorated relics, circuit boards and tribal fabrics, grounds the conceptual in the physical and brings honorable mention to the evolving brilliance of the products of the hand.

In Sennett's view, humankind is living simultaneously in two dimensions, one in which we are makers of things, and, absorbed by task, largely amoral. In a second dimension, we harbor the capacity to stop producing and ask "why?", placing our creations in the context of a moral outcome. Sennett discusses the virtue of practicing craft for humanizing the practitioner, who develops traits such as patience and the capacity for flexibility, improvisa
tion, and invention.

 

In the FUTURE RELIQUARIES series, I see a visual counterpart to Sennett's praise of craft mastery. For example, in the design for IKAT ALGORITHM, a 37" x 24" work, Heller drew inspiration from an ikat in her personal collection and a circuit board she extracted from a discarded computer, part of which she stitched to the finished work. Encoded tie-dyed warp patterns hatch into diagrams of circuit boards in a play of color and outline, the reliquary hand offering resolution of religious, craft, and digital dichotomy in a gesture of blessing. As the title of the series suggests, the past is just your future lived. Heller draws the viewer into the realm of magic, and reminds us that all genius and invention is born of the work of the hand. We can progressively deepen our respect and attention to our body and to what we produce. In her own words she chooses to approach designing and weaving with more joy: "these works are not sad, not deep, not emotional. Happiness is transient-why is it
not taken seriously?"



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Elliot Louis Gallery http://www.elliottlouis.com/