Art Gallery of St. Albert explores the industrial and natural cycle of sulphur. <\/p>\n
A yellow mountain on the horizon. Onion skins simmering in a pot. Clay transformed inside a kiln.<\/p>\n
For Calgary artist Lauren Chipeur, they are all part of the same story.<\/p>\n
Her exhibition, What on Earth is holding the loop up?, opened\u00a0Thursday, Sept. 3, at the Art Gallery of St. Albert\u2019s Tom Thackeray Gallery. The exhibition brings together ceramics, photography, paper and installation to explore sulphur and the unexpected ways it moves through natural and industrial systems.<\/p>\n
Chipeur\u2019s fascination began with the colour.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a bit obsessed with it because I was like, \u2018This is so yellow. What is this? Why is it this colour?\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
That question eventually led her from a small piece of raw sulphur to enormous industrial piles at the Syncrude Mildred Lake Facility north of Fort McMurray and at Vancouver Harbour.<\/p>\n
She photographed sulphur in industrial settings and farmers\u2019 fields, tracing its movement through fertilizer, soil and eventually food.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing that’s really compelling to me is that the bitumen is made from organic matter, compressed over time, so many years,\u201d Chipeur said. \u201cAnd so we actually have a relationship to it because it’s akin to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sulphur separated during oil and gas processing can eventually make its way into soil, where it can become part of the agricultural system, and, ultimately, the food people eat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just love thinking about consuming this byproduct of oil and gas,\u201d Chipeur said. \u201cI feel like we have a confusing relationship to what’s toxic and what’s safe. I think the internet’s like, \u2018This is bad or this is good.\u2019 There’s such a polarizing binary of what people believe to be true in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, Chipeur said she is interested in paying attention to the material itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m kind of thinking about materiality rather than what side of something we’re on,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
That approach carries into her ceramic work, which makes its debut in the exhibition. Chipeur has spent years experimenting with salt, carbon, clay and different firing conditions, embracing results that can be difficult to predict.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s a lot of failure, which can be healthy and a lot of unpredictability,\u201d she said. \u201cA friend of mine said opening a kiln is like going on a first date because you don’t know: is it going to be good?\u2029Is it going to be bad?\u201d<\/p>\n
Chipeur cast each layer of an onion in sulphur, allowing the molten material to cool and form crystals across the casts. The resulting objects shift from dark, translucent yellow to something more opaque and mineral-like.<\/p>\n
The exhibition also includes handmade paper dyed with onion skins sourced from a Calgary produce processor. Arranged as a tiled wall, the sheets carry different colours and marks created through the paper-making and dyeing process.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started with the colours and thought, \u2018Wow, I’m going to take pictures of these piles,\u2019\u201d Chipeur said. \u201cAnd the more I dug, the more layers came up and the more I was learning. It kind of just kept shedding new information and new curiosity.\u201d<\/p>\n
That same physicality is evident in the photographs of massive sulphur piles. Emily Baker, curator for the Art Gallery of St. Albert, points out that melted sulphur runs along the edges of some of the frames. The bright yellow material is part of the work itself.<\/p>\n
A reception and tour will be held Thursday, Sept. 17 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., followed by an artist-led onion-skin dye workshop from 6 to 8:30 p.m. The exhibit will be on display until Oct. 17.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Gallery of St. Albert explores the industrial and natural cycle of sulphur. A yellow mountain on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,366,18,117,19,17],"class_list":["post-677389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117231606064429407","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}