Darlene Shiels: Graven Images

It is ten years since Darlene Shiels held her last solo exhibition in Halifax. Then, she exhibited highly charged gestural landscape paintings in acrylic on canvas. Now, she exhibits linear portraits of women, paired with simplified imges of objects, plants and animals, each work made by carefully incising plywood. What has changed in ten years? What remains the same?

Certainly, a hard-won confidence of gesture, whether in carved line or brushstroke, typifies both bodies of work; and a courageous simplicity. There is no hidden agenda in Shiels' work, just a profound trust that people's innate sensibilities will recognize, and respond imaginatively to, the potential power of the image and image relationships.

Advertising uses instantly recognized, simplified images in order to co-opt meanings and associations for commerical purposes. Some of Shiels' enlarged, simplified quotes of familiar historic images -- Saint Teresa in ecstasy, perhaps, or Ingres' bather -- may be misread as ironic comments on this process: a kind of pop-art cartooning or cypher combining the comfort of familiar imagery with ease of reading. But it soon becomes apparent that the process is not as much ironic as "iconic". That is to say, Shiels is not seeking to drain meaning but to restore it. Her Teresa (after Bernini) is not a sly post-modern commentart on the much-maligned saint, but a loving deliniation of the essence of the familiar image. I do not mean to imply that Shiels is presenting a religious belief. Rather, she is responding directly to the sensuous power of the image itself.

In this exhibition, the image or Teresa is paired, appropriately enough, with the mystery of heavenly phenomena -- the image of a starry sky, titled Night Sky (after Ewen). It is inevitable that any artist working with gouged plywood is going to be compared to Paterson Ewen. Shiels acknowledges this, pays her homage and moves on. The resemblance between her work and Ewen's generally ceases with this homage. For, whereas Ewen's vigorous and expressive gouging relies on a raw, elemental approach, Shiels' process involves a series of carefully crafted refinements.

Excerpt from exhibition catalogue written by Susan Gibson Garvey.