Lake Country Art Gallery
ONLINE RESOURCES:
  • Home
  • About
    • Hours & Contact Info
    • Mandate >
      • Health & Safety Plan
    • Our Team >
      • Call for Directors
  • Exhibitions
    • Coming Soon
    • Exhibition Photo Gallery >
      • Mural Wall
      • Town Wall
      • Art Alley
      • Pop-up Gallery
    • Show your Work >
      • Apply to Curator for Exhibition
      • 2023 CALLS FOR ART
      • Artist Resources
  • EVENTS
    • Existential Café
    • ArtShelf Bookshop & Reading Room
  • ART HOUSE
    • Workshops/ Calendar
    • Resources
    • Artist Studios
  • Support
    • Membership & Donations
    • Volunteer
  • Art Words
    • Exhibition Catalogues

About Mary

7/15/2019

3 Comments

 
Picture

She’s Mary: a tribute to Mary Smith McCulloch from Carolyn MacHardy
​

Well yes, there IS something about Mary, isn’t there?! But how easy is it to identify just what that something
is? Mary moved to the Okanagan with her degree in printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art just as
the Fine Arts Department of Okanagan College was forming, and she became an integral part of this institution
and its successors. Mary’s teaching skills are legendary, and I was fortunate to have the chance to team-teach
with her for several years and to be a colleague and friend for many. I learned so much about teaching from
Mary: she was wise, very fair, and frankly, she was a ton of fun both inside and outside the studio, as the students
were well aware. Mary mentored her students, and I think the continuing success of printmaking in this
valley has a lot to do with her. She made it important and young artists understood that working with abrasive
chemicals, snapping etching plates like they were celery, and feeding paper into presses the size of small farm
machinery were all part of a day’s work in the printmaking studio. She was a role model for women in that she
combined an active family life with her full time work at the College, and I think it was a very important lesson
for her male students as well. At the time we had many women returning to do their studies in fine arts after
having started their own families and Mary gave them the confidence to do it. Nor did she ever pretend that it
was easy for a woman with a young family to succeed in a teaching career and as an artist, but her recognition
of that and her willingness to step forward and make sure her voice was heard on committees at all levels of
the College was important for all of us. She has also maintained a steady commitment to the local community,
working on many committees and boards, and giving countless workshops to groups in the Okanagan.

If I have to think of one work that really opened my eyes to Mary’s teaching and her approach to art, it would be
her work from 1982 called Kettle Valley Trestles. I saw it again recently in the home of some friends and was as
knocked out by it as I was when it was done. The sheer scale of it, and the immensity of the difficult geography
and topography of the scene which she tackled was a powerful demonstration for students and faculty alike
of what printmaking can do. The multiple perspectives, and the juxtaposition of battling views of the trestles,
first below your feet and then above and to either side of your field of vision, creates a revelatory statement
that uses etching to point out how complicated the terrain of this Valley is and how complicated its history is. I
understood something about my new home in a way that I hadn’t understood until then: that the Okanagan’s
challenging geography, best understood through multiple lenses, has been subjected to ongoing relentless
transformation whether by railroads, orcharding, vineyards or subdivisions.
So yes, there is something about Mary but I am no closer to being able to say what it is. The more I think about
it and the more I write, the less sure I am that I can put my finger on it, or if that is even possible.
She’s….. Mary.

Carolyn MacHardy
Asociate professor, Art History
Department of Creative Studies, UBC Okanagan

3 Comments

    LCAG Blog

    The LCAG Blog keeps the conversation going with various guest writers on current topics within the local and global art discourse.

    CONTRIBUTE your words...
    Write a shot piece about an exhibition you've seen, or share a poem or story that relates to a current exhibition. ​
    ​Send it to us for consideration.

    Archives

    March 2023
    December 2022
    April 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    February 2021
    September 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    January 2017

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly