HISTORY AT WORK

Medieval-tapestries were both decorative and informative. They remain inspirational. Take the Bayeux Tapestry, for instance. The zippy little number was begun around 1070 and, in the course of its 70 metres, tells the tale of the Norman Conquest of England. Sandra Sawatzky is a Calgary-based filmmaker, writer and artist. More importantly, she finds embroidery to be meditative, and, after a quick trip to the library to reacquaint herself with the Bayeux Tapestry, decided to create a tapestry—about 70 metres long—telling the story of how oil has impacted human civilization.

Nine years and some 16,000 hours of stitching later (she was in the habit of getting up at 5:15 a.m. and quitting for the day at 10:15 p.m.), Sawatzky has completed her project. The Black Gold

Tapestry goes on display at the Glenbow beginning Oct. 7. In a concession to modernity, it has a website, theblackgoldtapestry.com, so those who just can't wait can get a sneak peek.

The Sleeping Green, Dianne Bos’s latest series of photographs was similarly inspired by historical events. The Calgary artist travelled to the battlefields of the First World War some 100 years after the guns fell silent. Bos works with pinhole cameras, which require long exposures to capture images. This means her work captures both a place and the passing of time.

It’s an effect Bos heightens by incorporating objects found in no man’s land—rocks, leaves, a bullet—into her printing process. The technique, yielding as it does images that are both beautiful and eerie, is well-suited to a meditation on no man’s land some 100 years after it earned its name.

The Sleeping Green— the exhibition takes its title from a line in Break of Day

in the Trenches by the British war poet Isaac Rosenberg—runs Oct. 28 to Nov. 18 at Newzones. Bos will be signing copies of her limited-edition book at the opening.