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Newcomb’s whimsical, startling creations draw admirers at home and internationally
SCULPTOR MARY CATHERINE NEWCOMB is at the “in-between” stage when she’s restlessly searching for the idea that will be her next project.
On this day, when spring is still just a promise, she walks through newly fallen snow to her small garage studio at the end of a narrow driveway.
Newcomb unlocks the door and sunlight pours into the studio where boxes, a ladder, an ancient table saw, stool, shop vacuum, lumber and tools are packed in a small area.
“It’s almost like a secret space,” Newcomb says.
A sculpture of the head of a benevolentlooking hare waits to be stored in the attic. A relief sculpture, a treasured reminder of a “strong, wonderful” grandmother she got to know late in life, sits near a window. The piece, alluding to a Mayan goddess of the moon, shows a woman being hugged by a large rabbit.
There’s leftover wood from the frames she made for a recent installation at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, part of a “reunion tour” of the NetherMind collective, a group of artists that shook up the Toronto art establishment in the 1990s with exhibits in empty factories.
The UW piece, Ascension, featured steps leading to a wooden platform enclosed by a small field of wheat. A larger version was installed in a Toronto church last year.
“People don’t come back here,” Newcomb says, looking around the windowed garage.
“Every once in a while you get a knock on the door. But I’m told I am not welcoming when people just drop in,” she says, laughing.
She’s a collaborator, (she joined the NetherMind collective in the mid-1990s), but she likes private time to work. “I need the silence of the garage’s interior space.”
For now, Newcomb is tidying, cleaning and rearranging the little studio in anticipation of her next project. She’s experimenting with a variety of ideas.
“I’m in a gestational period,” she says. “I do all the in-between stuff like fixing my house. I’ll go for walks. The time ideas come for me is first thing in the morning.”
She can hardly wait to settle on an idea and sink her teeth into it. Making art is as necessary as breathing. “If you don’t do it, you go insane,” she says.
“I never look back. In a show, I think ‘hey, that looks pretty good.’ . . . Ten days later, it’s ‘been there, done that.’
“I forget all the stuff I’ve done. What’s in front of me is empty. That’s what >>