When a doctor melds her love of science with her love of art, the blend is fascinating.
Discipline and balance nurture Gloria Mok’s creative side
Entering Gloria Mok’s downtown studio, I was immediately struck by the unique and unexpected merging of art and science. Here, within the yellow brick walls of the 62-year-old Ellis Building, resides a creative space resonating of both a doctor’s office and a natural history museum.
Refurbished exam tables (those pink and white enamel ones from the ’50s and two wooden tables designed by Mok in the ’80s) act as work surfaces and run the length of one wall. Vintage X-ray viewers light up the red brick elevator shaft. Window ledges house an eclectic collection of natural and manmade items: coral and antlers; three-dimensional experiemental works; and miniture medical models.
Mok’s studio is one giant cabinet of curiosities. It makes sense once you discover that this accomplished artist is also a family doctor, the director of a six-physician clinic and a peer mentor in medical software. This rare career combination produces a studio that makes one lean in, look closer, ponder and daydream a narrative to accompany the work.
Mok embraces her life easily and joyfully. Talent, alongside focus and steadfast commitment, has allowed Mok to intersect two worlds.
“I think an artist does what he or she is about,” says Mok. “Your art represents you. Science is the area I know the best so it is reflected in my art.”
Mok studied traditional Chinese painting and piano in Hong Kong before arriving in Canada in her teens. School studies took precedence and she did not pursue art again until after the completion of her MD at the University of Alberta in 1974.
Working in medicine and raising a family, Mok studied art part-time at the Vancouver Community College and University of Alberta. Since 1984, she has attended workshops and residencies in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, Grande Prairie and the Banff Centre.
In 2009, a group project took Mok, along with Calgary artists Marc Hutchinson, Walter May, Greg Payce and Laura Vickerson and Diana Sherlock, visual arts writer/curator, to Normandy, France for a creative residency at Chateau Mathieu, an 18th-century, 30-plus-room residence.
Mok found melon covers on the property — once used as mini-greenhouses at the turn of the century — and wired two together to create a candle-lit chandelier in the 17th-century chapel. She then suspended a living olive tree grafted with the roots and cuttings from other plants. The olive tree was later replanted in the garden.
This residency led to a group show of new works at the Esplanade Gallery in Medicine Hat this year; a book is to be released early next year.
The topic of food weaves in and out of our conversation. Mok smiles, remembering how she and Diana shucked 90 oysters from a nearby bay in Normandy for the group’s dinner one night.
As we sip the Jasmine flower tea Mok bought in China, tranquility radiates from her ever-smiling face. I ask her how she juggles two flourishing careers and remains so calm and unhurried.
“I don’t get stressed out.” she says. “It’s not hard; it is not a struggle.
“I have a fairly routine lifestyle. I need my sleep, I need my meals, and the rest comes around that. If you eat well, you stay healthy and if you sleep well, then your thinking is clear. I tell that to all my patients.”
Mok purchased this 1,100-square-foot space for a studio in 2004 when she visited the building with a friend who was looking for a condo. She liked the 12-foothigh ceilings (15 feet in the elevator shaft); the quality of the light (it’s a corner unit with windows on both sides) and the warehouse architectural features. Coincidently, the Ellis Building was home to her very first studio in the mid-’80s and thus came with good memories.
“This is my space,” says Mok. “As Virginia Wolfe says, ‘a room of one’s own.’ This is a room of my own.”
The layout is simple but effective. One large, open room contains the work tables, art supplies and tools. Two bulletin boards are festooned with meaningful art references: industrial sites suggesting an environment that is strange and alien; photos from previous exhibitions; postcards collected over decades of fish skeletons and insects from natural history museums; and images of the work of other artists.
“You never know what is going to inspire you,” says Mok.
Rubber garage flooring covers the hardwood and the track lighting, painstakingly configured and adjusted, casts even light at nighttime. The attached galley kitchen ensures regular meals.
A smaller room with a sitting area, desk and computer acts as a study and accommodation for visiting artists. A large book shelf holds dozens of art books (Henri Matisse, Joseph Cornell, Kiki Smith) on one side and pure science (Audubon Masterpieces, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels and The Men Who Mapped the World) on the other.
Mok’s art practice is very diverse; the approach and medium is always dictated by the project. Biology, math, chemistry and anatomy feed the work that she expresses through drawings (ink and gouache); collages, sculptural forms and photography.
For Life Forms, a solo show at the former Edmonton Art Gallery, Mok took soft tissue X-rays of the cross section of everyday items, a pepper for example, then superimposed the images, scanned and printed them on Kodak fluorescent paper. In this way, she transformed common items into something strange and not easily identifiable.
Mok built three-dimensional forms from organic and man-made materials for Symbiosis at Harcourt House. Strange creatures displayed in cases in a lab setting allowed the viewer to spin a story. Are they real, alien or imaginary?
“Expedition to an unknown territory by an intrepid explorer, Gloria Mok,” she pronounces with triumph and laughter.
Mok is currently working on a scientifically inspired but artistically executed herbarium using native Alberta plants collected over the last three years.
Even with a busy schedule as a doctor, Mok is in the studio regularly and exhibited in two group shows this year.
“It’s a job,” says Mok. “You come to the studio and you work from 10 to 1 p.m. and one o’clock is lunch time!
“There are so many beautiful things in science that the general public is not aware of. I think of my role as more of an educator, to present science as an art form.”
Additional studio photos at edmontonjournal.com/life.