A master of spiritual wonder
One of a series of casual conversations with movers and shakers in our cultural community
I don’t know anything about art, but I know what’s interesting, and Kitchener sculpture artist Mary Catherine Newcomb is nothing if not interesting.
With a creative streak that mixes spiritual wonder with an agricultural bent filtered through a lens of comic absurdity, the soft-spoken sculptor has — in her four-decade career — undertaken a series of radical art projects as insightful as they are bold, provocative and visually arresting.
Fetuses grown from eggplants and squashes. Rabbit-head sculptures that sigh on command. Girl Guide cookie boxes filled with animal bones. Bread babies that gaze contentedly, defying you to eat them.
Newcomb — who teaches visual arts at Sheridan College and is part of the NetherMind collective — is one of many local artists finding sustenance in Waterloo Region’s small city atmosphere, an urban/rural divide that allows for the kind of artistic cross-
pollination that makes her Kitchener’s Mad Hatter of Agro-Art.
Why is there a Q-tip in the middle of your living room floor?
I paint the cow bones on the living room floor using watercolour. I don’t like to draw on the bones first so sometimes have to erase. Q-tips work best for this.
Let me rephrase the question: Why are there cow bones in the middle of your living room floor?
The cow is a continuing project — a bit of a Frankenstein cow, composed of bits of many individuals. It’s about collective cow memory.
Wait, a Frankenstein cow?
Cow bones painted all over with decorative motifs that are suspended in the gallery to make an almost skeleton. The bones are arranged further apart than they were in the cow, so people can get around and see what’s going on.
You have a Girl Guide cookie box filled with deer bones, also used for sculpture projects. Do you ever haul it out at dinner parties?
My daughter insisted I move them to the studio because they made her think of a box of little Girl Guide bones. I don’t usually take them out at parties.
I expected a stereotyped pretentious artist, but your work is filled with whimsicality and playfulness. Did you not get the memo?
It’s just what comes out. I don’t think humour and seriousness are mutually exclusive.
I notice you have a 20-inch TV, which seems unusual these days. Is this an artistic statement?
It is a TV. Sometimes I watch it.
Some of your most engaging art projects have involved rabbits. Rabbits?
When I was about 10, I was in a Quebec lodge in the winter. Some people came in after a walk and said they had found the place where the rabbits gathered in the snow under the full moon.
To me, it was like there’s a whole lot going on and no one is talking about it. It’s magic, and magic is real.
What happened to your giant earthand-sod rabbit installation at the Cambridge Sculpture Garden?
It flattened out, because people kept sitting on top of it and riding it.
Using the ’80s film classic “The Breakfast Club” as a handy reference, what were you like in high school?
Fish out of water. Shy.
That’s Ally Sheedy — an iconoclast. An artist. When did you realize this was something you could turn into an actual profession?
I am not sure that I did.
And yet, here you are, with a string of accolades, a decades-long career and riches you never could have imagined. I’m making an assumption about that last thing.
You know what you’re signing up for. You’re never going to be driving a fancy car. Basically, your choice is either your money or your life.
Your art has a definite agricultural bent. Where does that come from?
I like the idea of collaborating with nature. If I had to do it again, I would study agriculture. I might be a farmer.
Tell me about your eggplant and squash babies, grown from moulds made of clay.
I like the idea of growing people on plants.
It seems like art that could be easily misunderstood by the more hysterical factions of society.
Most people seemed to really enjoy it and think it was slightly magical. They liked walking around the garden and finding the baby under the leaves.
What makes a better baby — squash or eggplant?
The eggplants were mostly saints and a few babies, mice and rabbits. But Jumbo pink Banana squash are best for babies. They’re the right size, but not as pink as I would have liked. Quite orange, really.
I can’t lie — they remind me of the alien pods in the sci-fi classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
I have heard that before but most consider them benign.
You’re like a mad scientist of pickled babies.
Most people don’t live on the same mental world I do.
You told me you noticed them developing little personalities.
Growing things are always a bit out of control, so it’s always a surprise to see what you get. I was treating all these plants like babies. And they all had little personalities. It sounds so flaky.
Flaky but provocative.
It’s making the line between vegetable and animal just a little more blurry.
Tell me about the “bread baby.”
A (church) congregation wanted me to make bread for them. I don’t know whether they meant communion bread or not. The baby was one of the loaves that came out. Most of the others were body parts.
It reminds me of the gingerbread man from the movie “Shrek.” Do people try to eat it?
It’s a bit dry
How long can you keep it before it goes bad?
We shall see. I have had it for several years.
Have you ever considered opening your own “bread baby” bakery? I bet it would take off with weekend tchotchke hunters in UpTown Waterloo.
I might get bored. They should make their own bread babies instead of always buying things.
Your Cy cl of lo oz lea phone musical bicycle invention from a few years back was an intriguing idea, a collaborative exercise machine that included accordion reeds, valves and a toilet plunger.
It was a project to engage children. Dr. Seuss was the inspiration. I always wanted to try some of his contraptions when I was a kid.
Did anyone approach you to manufacture it as an alternate mode of transportation?
No. It appeared at the London Children’s Museum for several seasons, but storage became impossible so now it’s gone.
You grew up in Montreal, then lived in Vancouver, Hamilton and Toronto. Why the move to Kitchener?
Just to get away. It was overload for me. I needed to figure out what I was doing.
Coming from larger cities, did you experience culture shock?
I actually liked coming here. I’ve always been really fascinated by farm stuff. It was like coming to a foreign country. You can drive 10 minutes and be out in the country.
You said politicians tend to view artists as “absinthe drinking starving artists who burned their brains out” — what is absinthe?
It’s a drink distilled from wormwood, quite toxic. It was favourite of the art crowd in Paris in the late part of the 19th century. I am hoping that most politicians are a bit more sophisticated now.
Do you feel supported locally?
I don’t see this community as one that’s very interested in visual art. There are really amazing, smart interesting people. But we’re still pretty small. There’s stuff going on, but not enough stuff going on.
What’s the key to effective arts funding?
If you want art, you need to know the difference between a huckster, a hipster and an artist, and you have to respect the artists.
Where can people see your work, or should I just send them to your house?
It depends on who you are sending. My next exhibition will be at the Clarington Art Centre (in Bowmanville) in July. After that I will have a show at Loop Gallery in Toronto.