Echoing
Echoing
An exhibition of sculpture, photography, and painting by Susan Barton-Tait, Natalie Hunter and Corine van Hoeve
June 25th - September 13th 2026
Rodman Art Institute of Niagara
16 Towpath St.
Thorold, Ontario, Canada
https://rodmanart.ca/echoing
https://akimbo.ca/listings/echoing-susan-barton-tait-natalie-hunter-corine-van-hoeve/
An echo is a call and response, or a faint trace of the past. In Echoing, Thorold’s decommissioned mid-century fire station no. 1 is activated by three women artists at different stages of their artistic careers. Conversing with each other, the Rodman Art Institute of Niagara permanent collection, and responding to the immediate site, their gestures echo across the greater Niagara-Hamilton region and connect with heritage, memory, traces, and past experiences. Through sculpture, photography, and painting they consider discarded sites and materials as opportunities for re-invigorating industrialized landscapes around the Golden Horseshoe with initiatives that re-frame their use; highlighting their social, cultural, and historical value. Carefully studying Rodman Art Institute of Niagara’s extensive collection of contemporary and modern art Susan Barton-Tait, Natalie Hunter, and Corine van Hoeve contemplate the transformative potential embedded within sites that we take for granted during these uncertain times.
Often escaping our immediate notice, the humble brick is a mass produced construction material that forms the foundation of our regional cities. 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 many houses across Hamilton’s neighbourhoods. Similarly, the St. Catharines Standard building occupied a prominent place along the city’s downtown core before a tragic fire burned it to the ground; providing the region with local news and journalism through printed press and newspaper delivery. The image of a red brick is physically and symbolically embedded in the regional architecture across these two cities, but also becomes a deeply seeded memory that permeates the consciousness of citizens in the greater Hamilton-Niagara region. Susan Barton-Tait, Natalie Hunter, and Corine van Hoeve all use this iconic imagery as symbols, references, and material traces in their work while calling attention to the social, cultural, and historical value of decommissioned sites like Thorold’s fire station no.1, Hamilton Brick Works and the St. Catharines Standard.
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 brick-maker 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.
Natalie Hunter’s photo-based sculptures recall memories of place, light, sensation, and feeling. Translucent fabric photographs of Hamilton Brick Works iconic chimney stack drape over hand shaped steel armatures that reach up into the remaining architecture of fire station no. 1;. Anchored in place with found bricks from both Hamilton Brick Works and St. Catharines Standard building, these photo-based sculptures balance weight, tension, and weightlessness in a delicate conversation between the decommissioned building and other regional sites that have witnessed the same fate. Folding, bending, and draping in space, these photo-based sculptures make direct contact with the building; connecting imagery, materials, and objects in a conversation between disparate places and disused architecture. Billowing with air movements as a viewer walks by, the semi-translucent nature of her materials allow light to filter through areas of her images. As the natural light changes in the gallery space, so too does a viewer’s experience of the work. Malleable, fluid, and flowing the pictorial elements of each installation bend with the physical properties of the steel; blending with Corine van Hove’s paintings and Susan Barton-Tait’s paper bricks. Both revealing the shape of the armature underneath and concealing it at the same time. In these material gestures her work poetically considers the ways in which we perceive and remember post-industrial spaces through time, and how we embody physical place as psychological and sensorial experiences.
Brick-making 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 brick-making 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, Barton-Tait’s paper bricks, Hunter’s photo-based installations, and van Hoeve’s oil paintings transform Hamilton and St. Catherine’s humble red bricks into poetic gestures of regional labour, and a powerful symbol of what it took to build modern cities, and reimagine how these decommissioned sites can be re-used as social and cultural institutions.
Essay written 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.
Natalie Hunter is an artist and educator born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. Over the past fourteen 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. In her work she engages with the poetics of time, memory, temporality, and the senses - with an emphasis on embodied experience, perception, materiality, and personal memory. 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 also a sessional instructor and an inaugural recipient of the Liu Shiming Distinguished Educator Award (2025).
Corine van Hoeve is a 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.