The Strength and Fragility of Bodies: A Correspondence with Gillian King
Gillian King, As Above, So Below, OAG Annexe (2021) (Photo Credit: Sean Sytsma)
When Gillian King began painting the body of work for her show As Above, So Below in 2019, she could not have anticipated what would transpire over the next year leading up to its planned summer 2020 exhibition.
As COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March last year, King was working not only as an artist in her downtown Ottawa studio, but also as an art therapy student with groups and individuals living in long term care.
King’s practice would change drastically as galleries closed (including the Ottawa Art Gallery and its Annexe—where As Above, So Below was to be held), and the communities she worked with entered isolation.
“Over the few months that followed,” King writes in our correspondence, “the floor I used to work on was hit hard and residents I had worked closely with for the previous two years contracted the virus. By June, very sadly, some died of the virus.”
King says that she was able to put art kits together for isolated residents to use in their rooms, but it was not ideal: “That was a very dark and traumatic time. My coworkers and I were managing panic and grief as we started work on new units.”
Gillian King, photo credit Amy Zambonin (2020)
King—a painter, art educator, and art therapist-in-training from Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba—graduated from the University of Ottawa MFA program in 2016. Now, she is completing her Art Therapy certification through the Toronto Art Therapy Institute, and continues to work in long-term care.
When I ask if her experiences working in health care and as a student of art therapy has informed her art practice, she responds with the following:
“I would say that everything I do informs my art practice. Working in art therapy and art-making contexts with individuals living in long-term care and in the community has been incredibly fulfilling and I am constantly inspired by the incredible clients with whom I have the pleasure of creating art. Working with individuals who are in their last home or in end-of-life care has been such a privilege and has really expanded my perspective and understanding of the human condition, what it means to live with purpose, and the role art can play in making one’s life meaningful.”
It’s this insight that makes King’s work especially profound. In abstraction, it may not appear obvious at first, but beyond a viewer’s first glance of King’s stunning and brightly variegated canvases is a nuanced contemplation of human, plant, and animal bodies, our relationship with nature, and the human condition.
The context and actual experience of living through a pandemic has magnified the themes in King’s work. “In my own studio,” King writes about her artistic practice in 2020, “I really began to think about the vulnerability and resilience of not only my own body but the bodies of my friends, family, co-workers, and the residents that I work with in long term care. I could see this in how I was interpreting and responding to the dye-created forms in my paintings throughout the painting process.”
“I guess you could say that my perceptions of my latest paintings as I was making them have been informed by the strength and fragility of plant and animal bodies in the context of a pandemic.”
Gillian King, As Above, So Below, 60 x 48 inches (2021)
King’s artistic process is fascinating: her large-scale abstract paintings are created with oil paints as well as pigments from flowers, vegetables, plants, and insects. “My process incorporates gardening, gathering, printmaking, oil painting, and fiber art processes like eco-printing,” she says.
“Many of my dye materials are either grown in my garden or from my compost bin,” King explains further. “For instance, I grow my own marigold and calendula and collect all of the onion skins from onions my partner and I eat. These materials create many of the yellows, oranges, and green stains you see in the paintings.”
For the collection of works exhibiting in As Above, So Below, King not only harvested and collected her own natural dye materials but also used rust sediments and imported dyes like cochineal, sustainably sourced from beetles in Peru.
When asked about how she chooses, finds, or grows her materials, King explained that she tries to collect or purchase materials from companies with sustainable sourcing practices. “My materials are all chosen for their light and colour fastness,” she writes. “I also choose them for the colour and texture they provide in the dyeing processes.”
A look at King’s catalogue reveals that she has worked to hone these dyeing processes for some time. Her interest in natural pigments and dyes began to evolve after viewing ancient cave paintings in Europe, where she spent some time working with eco-fashion designer Elke Fiebig of Still Garments. King continued to develop this practice of gathering materials from her surroundings for dyeing at her residences in Skagaströnd, Iceland, and Toronto Island’s Artscape Gibraltar in 2018.
For King, this practice is more than just an aesthetic process—it’s a series of physical acts and chemical reactions that imbue the production of her final work with profound meaning.
“Growing many of the materials I use requires me to have my hands in the earth, tending to the materials,” she says. “My canvases require a steam dye method which involves heat and moisture that bubbles and rises into the air as the colours interact with one another and imprint onto the canvases.”
Gillian King, As Above, So Below, OAG Annexe (March 2021) (Photo Credit: Sean Sytsma)
This is readily apparent in her current show at the OAG’s Annexe, titled to reflect this connection, King explained in our interview. “I see the phrase ‘As Above, So Below’ relating to the process of creation as much as the forms within the paintings themselves.”
“The title of the show came to mind in 2019 as I began the paintings,” King explains. “For me, the creation of paintings is a deeply personal and spiritual endeavour that allows me to understand my relation to the world and role within it. Finding an exhibition title that could both relate to the forms emerging within the paintings and allude to these belief systems was important. I see the materials and forms within my paintings as well as the processes I use to create them as relating to both the earth and the sky (above and below).”
When the show was postponed for a year, King found herself with the time to reimagine her planned works. “I had initially started working on a series of smaller works but made the decision to scale up as the work was underway,” she says.
The final series—which was originally on exhibit until April 18th at the OAG’s Annexe but is now “paused” for the time being under Ontario’s most recent lockdown—is a collection of eight large scale, abstract paintings.
In this series of works, King draws on the symmetries that result from her dyeing process in the gestural forms she paints onto her canvases. Many of the shapes, forms, and patterns one can draw from the imagery, titles, and textures in works such as Arachnoid—a large scale work made with rust sediments, oil, and various natural materials including black walnut, indigo, onion skins, and sumac—are evocative of overlapping human, animal, natural, architectural, and even cosmic forms.
Gillian King, photo credit Amy Zambonin (2020)
I asked King if she approaches her work with intent to draw out these visual themes, or if it is something that arises naturally from her art-making process. In our correspondence, she responded:
“I have been working with the symmetries formed during my eco-printing process for several years now, drawing relationships between them and forms found within the natural world. I purposefully prepare my canvases in ways that cause symmetries to emerge. Once each canvas is stretched onto it’s frame, I engage with them using painterly gestures, with the intent of drawing attention to the natural forms while creating areas of tension.”
Speaking to her large scale piece, Arachnoid, King explains how the painterly forms were inspired not only by the prints created through the folds of her dyeing process—which she says visually reminded her of a spinal cord—but also by further research in anatomy and the natural world around her.
“I see the materials and forms within my paintings as well as the processes I use to create them as relating to both the earth and the sky (above and below).”
In Alveoli, another large-scale work in this series, King says these connections between themes of the body and a global pandemic may appear more obvious.
The work (made using a wide variety of materials such as rust sediments, oil, and various natural materials including black walnut, cochineal, indigo, madder root, onion skins, and sumac) appears as a bright burst of spotted colour, floating above clouds of black vessel-like patterns that spread across the bottom half of the canvas.
King says “the symmetry that the prints created started to remind me of lungs and in my research on the anatomy of lungs I discovered that the tiny air sacs in our lungs are called alveoli.”
For King, this interest in the visual structures of plant, animal, and human bodies has a deeper meaning: “I guess you could say that my perceptions of my latest paintings as I was making them have been informed by the strength and fragility of plant and animal bodies in the context of a pandemic.”
Gillian King, Through One’s Own Eyes, 72 x 60 inches (2021)
For now, As Above, So Below has been put on pause while the Ottawa Art Gallery and its Annexe comply with Ontario’s stay-at-home orders under the latest lockdown. King is hopeful that the show will be able to reopen sometime in May.
Until then, King will be planning for her next group exhibition at Colborne Street Gallery this summer and working on expanding her repertoire of art-making processes. “I anticipate that much of my studio time will involve teaching myself how to use my new tufting gun,” she writes. Tufting guns are typically used to create rugs using yarn—and imagining the ways King will use this technique in her work is truly exciting.
King is also completing the final semester of her art therapy program with the Art Therapy Institute in Toronto. Over the next year, she writes, “I will be transitioning from art therapy student to art therapist and look forward to being able to take on clients in a private practice context.”
Gillian King, photo credit Amy Zambonin (2020)
As Above, So Below is a striking body of work. It is truly remarkable how King created this collection while not only navigating her own personal journey through the pandemic, but also the experiences of others in her work in health care and art therapy. Through her artistic practice, King gives us insight into the delicate connections between different forms and parts of life. Her work can inspire resilience in all of us to keep practicing, keep learning, and keep exploring to better our own understandings of ourselves and the world around us--even in the darkest of times.