Bridging Vision: Templates for Activism curator: cj fleury
City Art Gallery, Ottawa
paint and coloured pencil on plywood, 8' x 10' high
photo: Roger LaPlante

Fierce Protection is part of a sequence of works, The Cosmic Dust Series, that I have created over the years to express my relationship with my daughter, Anna. I choose to work within the series in connection to the NAWL conference, Women, Family and the State, in order to explore my current role as a mother experiencing the trepidations that most parents feel as their children approach adulthood, especially, womanhood.

This sense of anxiety is exacerbated by my concerns about contemporary values in western culture and how they will impact on Anna¹s future, on all children's lives. I see the world being dismantled by patriarchal warmongering, capitalist greed and post modern malaise. However, I do have hope, I see the work of many women artists and lawyers as being part of a constructive means to critique and curb this destructive mindset, a positive process by which to turn the tide of Western nihilism that threatens to engulf the world.

Narrative paintings can be read as one reads any story. As an eco-feminist artist, I have gleaned symbols from my research and personal life in order to create a work that reflects this particular quandary of motherhood. For those unfamiliar with these metaphors, the bear is an ancient representation of the potential within the fierce maternal nature of protection, the baby is that sublime state of innocence, safe within that maternal sphere. The car lights are the distressing, hurried hubris of contemporary urban culture -blithely unaware, yet, ever so self important. The cautionary hand of the traffic light could be a warning symbol of the ³body² of law. Those barely visible stars- constellations in the dome of the sky (The Big Dipper, Little Dipper - referred to as the Big Bear and Little Bear in other cultures, and Draco) are, for me, guides of a more ancient order, Nature. The format is that of a triptych, to play off of familiar religious iconography. The life size scale is meant to draw the viewer more strongly into the implied drama of the tableau. The twigs and branches are an acknowledgment of the tree/s used to build the plywood structure. The rambling text on the back is my real struggle within the processes of motherhood, creation, and the ideas embodied within them.

"...Today, we are more conscious of what type of an environment we wish to live in and what quality of life we wish to expose our children [to]." This Court has recognized that "[e]veryone is aware that individually and collectively, we are responsible for preserving the natural environment...environmental protection [has] emerged as a fundamental value in Canadian society"...

from the judgment of L'Heureux-Dubé, Gonthier, Bastarache, and Arbour JJ.

114957 Canada Ltee (Spraytech, Societé d'arrosage) v. Hudson (Town)