brickworks
brickworks
An exhibition of sculpture and paintings by Susan Barton-Tait and Corine van Hoeve
Curatorial essay by Natalie Hunter
Walking through Gage Park, I meet a familiar site; rusty red pigmented dust coating the
road, with row upon row of stacked bricks piled high like towers in the yard by the railway. This
is what I remember as a child while walking along the paths with my grandfather feeding
squirrels in the park. When we’d reach Lawrence Road he’d point out the iconic brick oven
stack of Hamilton Brick Works just across from the baseball fields.
Hamilton Brick Works occupies a prominent location alongside Hamilton’s escarpment.Embedded directly into the rich red clay at the base of the mountain, bricks were churned out of this factory for over a century. These same bricks were used to build my grandparents home along Cumberland Avenue, and likely used to build many others in Hamilton’s historic neighbourhoods. The image of a red brick is physically embedded in the regional architecture of Hamilton’s neighbourhoods, but also becomes a deeply seeded memory that permeates the consciousness of Hamiltonians. Susan Barton-Tait and Corine van Hoeve both use these iconic red bricks as symbols, references, and material traces in their work.
Often escaping our immediate notice, the brick is a mass produced construction material that forms the foundation of a home. Susan Barton-Tait uses the brick as an object to encase and trace, while referencing the process, seriality, and labour in which these bricks were originally made. Using a single brick as an inverted mould, she coats the sides of each brick in layers of wax. When the wax cools it is peeled off to form a two-dimensional skin that becomes a mirrored mould. Susan then begins a labour intensive process of applying paper
pulp to the moulds. Layer by layer the pulp is added to form a two-dimensional trace of the
brick surface captured in wax. When the pulp dries into paper, it is peeled off of the wax mould
and folded back into a three dimensional form that mirrors the original brick. Maintaining volume, but lacking weight and mass, these impressions of a brick are stacked, piled, and
jumbled into mounds containing hundreds of delicately cast paper bricks that maintain the
subtle nuances and details of the original found brick. Like a brickmaker shaping clay into
identical rectangles using a mould, Susan repeats her process over and over again; forming
impressions and traces of the brick held within the delicacies of paper. The juxtaposition between the heavy, dense, red brick, and the subtle weightlessness of the white paper softens
this utilitarian object. Quiet and understated, with an aesthetic that mimics the texture of braille,
Susan’s bricks are impactful in their own right. They are embedded with elements of her
hand-made, fibre-based, and time consuming process that counters the industrial process in
which bricks are formed, fired, and hardened for building materials.
Brickmaking and bricklaying are highly skilled trades crafts. A bricklayer spends years
as an apprentice honing their craft until the acts of mudding, laying, and pointing with a trowel
become second nature. For Corine van Hoeve, witnessing the ease with which bricklayers
wield a trowel to build a wall in her Dundas home is akin to the thick layers of oil paint that
build up in her paintings using palette knives and broad brushstrokes. Blocking in the image
while painting the brick from life, Corine uses scale and impressionist realism to celebrate the
humble brick. Her large scale painting of a single individual brick functions as a heroic portrait
of a long used but often overlooked building material. Larger than life, these paintings isolate
Hamilton’s iconic brick found in many working-class dwellings and heritage homes across the
city. Highlighting the stamped Hamilton name, this humble brick is raised to the status of high
art. The subtle nuances captured in thick impasto celebrates the labour associated with
brickmaking and construction work. Employing a palette of warm burnt umber, and burnt
sienna, Corine’s smaller paintings on paper maintain the immediacy of the painting process.
Often produced a la prima in a matter of hours, each painting contains traces of the artist’s
hand. Layers of palette knife and brush work almost read like wet clay before a brick is dried
and fired. Clustered together in compositions of three to five, these true to life sized paintings
allow me to imagine what is underneath the pure white drywall of the space they hang in. It’s as
if Corine has peeled back the wall to reveal the foundation of the building underneath. Her use
of trompe l'oeil heightens this assumption, and I am unable to distinguish the real brick wall
from its skilled copy.
The utilitarian brick as an art object within art history is nothing new. Long before Carl
Andre was stacking bricks in minimalist sculptural gestures in the 1970’s, bricks were individually hand made and used by indigenous cultures across the world to build civilizations
that are still standing today. Many cities of Europe and the British Isles were shaped by bricks
during the industrial revolution. This humble material contains a rich global history. With an
astute attention to materials, process, and the meaning they create, Susan’s paper bricks, and
Corine’s oil paintings transform Hamilton’s humble red brick into poetic gestures of regional
labour, and a powerful symbol of what it takes to build a home. Using processes that reflect
their respective disciplines Susan Barton-Tait and Corine van Hoeve reframe and reimagine the
humble Hamilton brick as a social, and cultural signifier. Their approaches to making reflect
processes of labour and memory embedded within Hamilton’s core values and history as a
working class city. And they make visible the influences of architecture in our daily lives.
Curatorial Essay by Natalie Hunter
Artist Biographies
Susan Barton-Tait has been exploring concepts of home, impermanence, fragility, repetition,
and everyday life in her fibre-based art practice since 1972. Employing weaving, knitting, batik,
crocheting, felting, and paper making, she uses these processes connected to craft and
women’s work to manipulate materials and create meaning. Susan studied at Queen’s
University, University of Iowa, University of Manitoba, and the Banff School of Fine Arts. Her
work has been presented in solo, group, and touring exhibitions, earning recognition and
awards from various granting agencies including Manitoba Arts Council, City of Winnipeg, City
of Hamilton, and Banff Centre for the Arts. Her work has found its place in both public and
private collections, including esteemed collections such as the Manitoba Visual Art Bank, The
Canada Council Art Bank, and the Massey Foundation. She currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario
and calls The Cotton Factory her creative home.
Corine van Hoeve is an emerging contemporary painter in Hamilton, Ontario and calls The
Cotton Factory her studio home. In her work she explores various societal themes, often
painting and drawing from observation using oil paints, watercolours or handmade inks. Corine
completed degrees at The University of Toronto, Western University, and University of Guelph
before participating in Advanced Studio courses at the Dundas Valley School of Art. Her work
has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Hamilton, Guelph, Dundas, Grimsby, and
Toronto, and she has been painting since 2012.
cvanhoeve.ca
Curator Biography
Natalie Hunter is an artist and educator born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. Over the past
thirteen years she has worked across photography, installation, sculpture, and the moving
image, and is mostly known for her multilayered and experiential photo-based installations on
transparent film. Her studio practice engages with the poetics of time, memory, temporality,
chance, perception, the archive, and the senses - with an emphasis on embodied experience,
perception, materiality, personal memory, and identity. Natalie Hunter is the recipient of many
Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grants, and Ontario Arts Council Visual
Artists Creation Project Grants and has shown her work in public art galleries and artist-run-centres across Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo where she is a sessional instructor, and received an Excellence in Online Teaching Award (2017). She lives and works in her home city of Hamilton, Ontario.