Celebrating the art of Lyndal Osborne
Lyndal Osborne’s awe-inspiring installations on display at AGA
PREVIEW Lyndal Osborne: Bowerbird: Life as Art Where: Art Gallery of Alberta, 2 Sir Winston Churchill Square When: Saturday through April 27 Tickets: Gallery admission $12.50 adults
Daily, strolling along the coast and railway lines with her family as a child in the ’40s, Lyndal Osborne learned lifelong lessons.
As cycles of birth-through-death sprawled beached and motionless along the path in her native Australia, she observed, plucked and most importantly shared her finds with her parents and sisters. These traits are the backbone of her grandiose, meticulous and poetically awe-inspiring installations today, which have been shown more than 350 times worldwide in the last 35 years.
The Art Gallery of Alberta presents a sweeping, hypnotic career retrospective of Osborne’s work starting Saturday, in an exhibit called Bowerbird: Life as Art. The scale, colour and staggering number of works occupy floors, tables, walls, shelves: twists of mad science and fabricated taxonomy, symbolically terrifying — yet always deliberately beautiful.
“Basically, I’ve always walked around a lot,” says the 73-year-old, who has been an Edmontonian since 1971. “For six months, I was just looking for abandoned birds nests. Something about looking for a specific thing, you get attuned to being able to find it. Because I do most of my collecting in the winter months, I could see this little cap of snow. I had to get it before the snow melted and the bottom fell out.
“That became a particular way of looking.”
The show’s title comes from the birds of her youth, bowerbirds which, consciously or not, made art to attract mates. “They took everything blue from our yards — clothes, pegs, they ripped clothes off the line, tea sets, glass. Anything that was blue. Some of them collect shells, bones, feathers. And they change it if they’re not impressing the females.
“It reminds me when I first started doing installation, when I didn’t really understand it very well. I would just put piles of things all round the floor, put A next to B, or join A, B and C together. There was a lot of that bower-birding, to try to impress me.”
Teased that she’s been trying to attract a mate, she laughs, “No, not really.”
Long before Berlin-to-Brooklyn fads of taxidermy and science decor invaded runways and chain retail spaces like Anthropologie, the University of Alberta art and design professor emeritus was collecting rinds and shells, skins and stalks — anything you can imagine — and in numbers that ultimately filled a warehouse space on her acreage, with her husband, artist John Freeman. This survey show filled three trucks, and occupies the entire third floor at the AGA.
“I always need to have a lot of the one thing before I can start to think about how I would use it,” she notes, her works often piled, shelved or strewn in staggering numbers, gorgeously mixing found and donated objects, generally dyed, glued or altered to a familiar unfamiliar.
To this day, if she’s near water, “I’ll always walk the beach. I’m always thinking of ideas that are associated with pieces that I’ve done ...
“There’s two different kinds of collecting, really. One where it’s very specific and then one where you know you can use this at some point, and it’s too good to miss. I really only think of the material as material. I don’t mind it bringing a little bit of its history into the piece, but that’s not usually important to me. I’m just interested in seeing what I can do with it.”
Catherine Crowston, the AGA’s executive director and chief curator, speaks to Osborne’s importance and influence. “Lyndal is one of Edmonton’s senior artists. Through her work at the university, she’s had an impact on a couple of generations of artists. Though her work there with Walter Jule and Liz Ingram, she helped Edmonton become internationally known as a centre of printmaking.”
The curator talks about implementing what must be at least hundreds of thousands of objects — not counting grains of sand. “National shipping of this would have been quite a substantial thing. It’s fortunate for us it was just down the road. She’s remarkably organized. We had a crew of about 15 working on this; normally it’s about six or seven.”
Osborne brought in helpers familiar with the work. It you see the show, you’ll understand how daunting a task they managed, seamlessly. It’s spectacular.
“For us more of the challenge,” notes Crowston, “is making sure people don’t touch and pick and take things. The constant vigilance, and knowing when something’s been moved or changed. Inevitably, the work is so tactile, people want to touch it.”
Luckily, Osborne also has a simultaneous installation in the BMO children’s gallery on the main floor, called Cabinets of Curiosity. “You get to see the work she’s done upstairs, and then downstairs is a much more interactive experience.” Crowston starts laughing, “So if you can’t help yourself ...”
John’s son Paul Freeman, who’s shown at the AGA, notes qualities his own mutant sculptures share with the art of his dad’s wife. “There’s a fascination with the future of science. Artists have this freedom that scientists will never enjoy, to invent problems that don’t matter, to investigate questions that are maybe fantastic. The experiments and the studios become like laboratories.”
As Bower bird demonstrates, Osborne’s career began with printmaking and became object- and sculpture-based, echoing with themes of life and death, genetically modified organisms, urban sprawl, militarism, overpopulation and extinction.
“I have a certain set of issues and concerns and ideas that I’m interested in exploring,” she says.
But she’s unsentimental, and will repurpose pieces of a show. And with some materials, don’t get her started.
“Grapefruits skins,” she laughs. “I never want to look at another one in my entire life.”