With Words as their Actions has three components – the text, the bookmarks and the lady heads. Anne Dewar’s 5,000-word text (over 6000 in the French translation) is water- jet cut in a 72–foot long curving stainless steel curtain that weaves in and out of the station’s columns. Alternating lines of text are cut through on one side in English in Roman letters, interwoven with the French translation in italics cut through from the other side. The nearly 12,000 words subtracted from the steel, the curvaceous- ness of the metal and the alternating line work make a lacy curtain that recalls the intricacy of hand embroidery, knitting and other fabric arts traditionally considered women’s work. Long, sinuous and lacy, the sculpture mimics a long drawn out story with its many asides. As you move along, in it and around it, it quickly transforms from solid to sheer. You need to walk it to read it. You want to run your hand along it like a kid running along a curtain. Meant to be read in small increments in the few minutes that you have at the concourse level of the station, the sculpture encourages repeated readings over multiple trips to eventually get the whole text. The text cannot be instantly consumed, but instead mulled over, slowly building a mental image of the Bytown that was. Like nubbles or drop stitches in the fabric, bookmarks create a structure for how to do that: each paragraph is marked with a turned out drop cap letter (like mediæval manuscript chapter openings), creating a pattern of ‘bookmarks’, allowing you to pick up where you left off the next time you are at the station. Dewar’s text is a vast inventory that allows for (or is even best enjoyed when) dipping in small doses. The lady heads are silhouettes of the society’s 1898 founders, paying tribute to these women who kept Bytown alive. The silhouettes were drawn and extrapolated from the few extant photographs in Canadian archives – in some cases only a single photo exists – of each individual woman. Their names are etched into their collars. Some were prominent in their own right like Lady Edgar and Zoe Laurier, some by association with their husbands, and others were young and unmarried and have virtually disappeared from history. In the sculpture, their silhouettes are gathered in conversation presiding over the curtain, passing knowledge to each other as equals. Although referencing Victorian era silhouettes, these are drawn as profiles rather than being solid (shadow) heads, the transparency allowing a layering that reads like the ladies are talking across the room, with the viewer immersed
PLANT Architect Inc
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on site review 36: our material future
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