something flat, yet Kathleen Barrett's high- and bas-relief pieces are anything but. The sinuous nudes, wild horses, and fragments of ancient architecture she produces in her Strathcona studio are all strongly dimensional--small sculptures, essentially--which is hardly surprising given that Barrett has been shaping materials with her hands since she was a kid growing up in Montreal.
Even in kindergarten, she says over coffee in the kitchen of a house that doubles as home and atelier, she was fascinated by the potential of Plastiscene and was lucky enough to have a teacher who recognized her talent at making miniature horses and wolves. University studies included lessons with abstract painter Guido Molinari that steered her temporarily toward canvas, but funding her studio time with part-time work at the university film library, Barrett set out after graduating to establish herself as a sculptor.
Partly because the job collapsed, partly to join a sister who already lived here, she moved to Vancouver in 1996, finding it no lotus land but a city where work with the flexible hours she needed was in short supply. Hearing of a possible market, she began making small oblong renditions of architectural details: some inspired by the stonework of building facades in vieux Montreal, others by Celtic designs. "People have been reproducing antiques for ages," she says, but she wasn't in the line-for-line copying business. "As soon as I started doing it, I started moving away [from the originals] and making my own pieces."
On the terra cotta--coloured kitchen wall hangs a relief of a nymph, her back and raised arms a collection of flawless curves. Barrett says what inspired her was a photograph of a fountain at Versailles. Because he's sensuous rather than macho, she says, a faun in the series causes double takes when she takes him on the road to art shows in the States; a more muscular figure from her set of Running Nudes was spied by a TV set designer in a San Francisco store and spent two years on a mantel in Will & Grace. Barrett notes of the stylized figure: "He's quite well endowed," a fact lost on home viewers because of camera distance. Like the three others in the series, the strong diagonal lines suggest art-deco origins but are actually based on one of Barrett's own artworks. The head-tossing, nostril-flaring energy of Horses derives from Greek and Roman sources. Her newest series grew from her own involvement in yoga. Edited down to utmost simplicity, the Dancing Shiva, Scorpion, Crow, and other poses read like hieroglyphs in an ancient language, their simple, swooping curves and elegant arcs reflecting the approach she takes in her large sculptures and paintings.
Even though her work is in European and corporate collections, and represented locally at the Simon Patrich Gallery, Barrett says she couldn't make a living as a full-time sculptor. Still, her hands-on experience with larger works did make creating on a small scale an easier process, she says. In her basement studio, she begins by moulding each shape in Plastiscene using "one little knife with a broken handle", and occasionally incorporating pieces of found objects: lengths of bamboo behind a quartet of horses; a section of branch, a textural curve, beside a Dog yoga pose. Once she is satisfied with contours and details, Barrett builds a small wood frame around the Plastiscene shape, then pours in the polyurethane that creates the mould for the Hydro-Stone ("a type of plaster but ten times harder") that she casts her reliefs in. The pieces harden in a separate, shelf-lined room equipped with a dehumidifier and dryer. Some are left pristinely white; to others she applies dyes, stains, or paints to tint them in warm browns, followed by a coat of finishing wax for subtle lustre. Walls, shelves, and mantels are the usual display areas, although Barrett says some designers have incorporated her work, suitably sealed to protect it, in bathroom walls. (There's a reason why classically influenced design vaults over trends. The nymph on Barrett's kitchen wall looks right at home in its funky 1930s surroundings, but the same piece could also live amicably with traditional antiques, chrome-and-glass moderne furniture, or sleek contemporary design.)
Even though Barrett makes and finishes each piece by hand, she has only recently started signing them. She doesn't number them, although she admits "I should have. They're not mass-produced by any means." Nor does she ever envisage a large factory-type operation. She would rather bring in partners than employees.
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