‘CREATIVE ACTIVISM’
Cole focuses on creativity in small-town Sask.
Martha Cole explains her love for using wood as an art medium at her Disley home. Cole will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Saskatchewan Arts Awards on Nov. 4, in Saskatoon. Cole says beauty — most specifically, nature — has inspired her work.
DISLEY In a back corner of an old Anglican Church, beyond tomato cages, garment bags and other stored stuff, stands a series of stripped-bare tree limbs.
Martha Cole lovingly strokes one pale yellow branch, pointing out its subtle ripples.
As yet, all she has done to this piece of maple tree is removed its bark. It is raw material.
In her nearby studio, there are finished pieces.
She cradles a little log, sanded down and stained to emphasize its worm-chewed lines.
“Isn’t it lovely? And it feels good,” Cole says softly, in near-singing cadence.
She picks up and praises a cane with wood-burnt rings around its nodes: “Just look at the form. I have done very little with that form. The form is the tree.”
Though Cole is being honoured with the lifetime achievement award at the Saskatchewan Arts Awards in Saskatoon, her life of achieving goes on.
A longtime textile artist, she’s a new member of the Regina Whittlers & Woodcarvers guild, revisiting one of her first passions.
“I’ve gone back to woodcarving because I’d like to know, at 74 — it’s been 60 years — what a Martha Cole sculpture is going to look like.”
Cole was about 14 years old when she saw Henry Moore’s carved wood sculptures at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Awestruck, she decided to be a sculptor.
Her art teacher, Helmut Becker, was encouraging. He provided tutoring at Martin Collegiate, and taught her to access Saskatchewan Arts Board funding.
He helped her apply to the University of Washington, where she got her fine arts degree.
She then moved to Toronto, to be an artist. It didn’t happen.
She got an education degree and “had a migraine every Saturday” during the three years she taught art.
“The least productive time of my whole life was when I was in Toronto. Because it’s too busy; there’s too much distraction,” says Cole.
But, she would come home in summers, and create in her parents’ garage. She realized, “You get a lot of things done here. Maybe this is how you can do it.”
So Cole moved back to Regina, and started looking for spaces in small towns — old schools, storefronts, churches — that would make an affordable studio. She bought the defunct Disley United Church in 1978. (The Anglican Church was later moved next door, a purchase for $200 on a $75 lot of land.)
During the two years she awaited its renovation, she honed an unexpected skill in her parents’ basement: sewing.
“I took Latin for four years in high school, so that I wouldn’t have to take home economics,” says Cole. But she began to see sewing in a new light, and joined the stitchery guild and Saskatchewan Craft Council.
By the time her Disley studio was ready for all her sculpting equipment, “I didn’t have a sculpture idea in my head, but I had 20 years of fabric ones. So then I got serious about fabric.”
Today, the refurbished United church is her home with her partner Heather Elliott.
Cole’s new studio was built in 2000. It is a bright space, with inspirational quotes and photos pinned to the walls. There’s ample table room to spread out fabrics from her cupboard stores.
A longarm quilting machine is her “drawing tool,” letting her amplify the details of fabric-printed photographs.
In the four decades since Cole returned to Saskatchewan, she has made artwork her career.
Until it could financially sustain her, she had a part-time job as a secretary-typist in the Plains Hospital medical library, and spent long hours in the studio on her days off.
Among her first exhibitions were two Saskatchewan Opens at the Mendel Art Gallery, even though the application didn’t list textiles as a qualifying medium.
“I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’m an artist who works in fabric. Because I’m an artist, that makes it artwork.’ And I entered and I got in. You never saw textiles in galleries when I started.
“It’s a domestic medium … they dismiss it.”
That has changed over the years. Cole’s works have been shown many times across Saskatchewan and beyond.
She was chosen for Quilt National in Ohio in 2015.
Ten years earlier, she travelled to 17 Saskatchewan communities for “Survivors,” an Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils’ Centennial celebration.
Assisting these communities to create a specific project, “Every community was unique,” says Cole.
“It was unique because of the sharing and commitment of the artists who were already living there.”
Cole says beauty — most specifically, nature — has inspired her work.
Being “firmly attached to the land here,” she creates textile landscapes of Saskatchewan.
“I’m also out to save the planet. That’s another small part of what I do,” she says.
“I think of it as creative activism, versus social activism. … I do work hard to make you see the things around us that are worth saving.”
Things like stitching to enhance 15 fabric-printed photos of different trees’ bark.
“Nothing would please me more than to have (someone) say, ‘Well, I’m never going to look at a tree the same again.’ I’m a happy camper. “So I give it my best shot.”
In her front yard, within a grove of trees, Cole has created a woodsy installation, erecting trunks and limbs from concrete — her version of gardening, she says.
Cole’s life these days is about trying new things; “beginner mind,” she calls it.
“I’m not exhibiting it, I’m learning it. That’s a very different space to be in,” says Cole, who spent her whole career booking shows and creating works on deadline.
“And partly that comes from being my age and realizing that I have enough money. I have enough — I don’t have more than that; I’m an artist after all. But I’ve got enough,” says Cole.
“So that means I can (say), ‘OK, given the amount of time I’ve got left, how do I want to spend it?’ And I would like to spend it to find out what a Martha Cole sculpture looks like, amongst other things.”
The Saskatchewan Arts Awards ceremony is Monday, Nov. 4, at the Remai Arts Centre in Saskatoon.