For 18 years, Sandra Sawatzky has been working with thread and fabric, embroidering pictures and text on large fabric panels that take years to create.
The 67-year-old from Calgary, is exhibiting two works this spring. Her 2022 work, The Age of Uncertaint,y is at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery until early March and her 2017 piece The Black Gold Tapestry, a 67-metre long history of humanity’s relationship with oil, is part of a group show at the Museum of Design Atlanta, in Georgia until May.
The Age of Uncertainty features 12 panels, 106.5 by 137 centimetres in diameter and modelled after pages in medieval books of hours. Each panel contains a main section with pictures engaging a certain theme, with marginalia with drolleries depicting the animal and plant kingdoms and a quotation at the bottom.
“I tried to make my own drolleries of the animal kingdom getting theirs. It was a reference to how, even back in the 1300s, [people] realized the animal world was always at the mercy of humans, and to turn it on its head,” said Sawatzky.
The panel themes—including environment, debt, inequality, resource scarcity, war and nuclear threat—came out of her research for The Black Gold Tapestry on what today’s young people are most concerned about when it comes to their futures. Sawatzky added artificial intelligence and surveillance to the mix.
With beautiful, boldly coloured silk thread, Sawatzky critically examines human-created problems that threaten not only themselves but other species on the planet. She devoted half of each panel’s coverage to the natural world. For her, the juxtaposition of horrific realities with artistic flourish is intentional.
“I thought that, by making it beautiful, it encourages people to move in closer and look at it,” said Sawatzky. “It’s pretty easy when you see horrific photos of war and the terrible things we have done in the name of whatever to either stop yourself from having an emotional response or turn around and ignore it.”
The epic scale of The Black Gold Tapestry, inspired by the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066, engages viewers with what could be a boring story—our historic use of oil—if produced as a documentary, Sawatzky said.
And she could have produced a documentary. Having studied illustration and design at the Alberta College of Art and Film at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in the 1980s, Sawatzky produced two shorts and a feature-length film. The shorts did well at festivals in Canada and around the world, but the distributor for her film, The Girl Who Married a Ghost, went out of business. She turned to embroidery after seeing a 2007 show at the Glenbow Museum, featuring the handiwork of pioneer women.
“The work was on par with anything you’d see in Paris,” said Sawatzky, who, since the age of 13, had sewn and embellished her own clothes and could sew a good uniform stitch. Thinking she could slowly work at creating her own “film on cloth,” as she put it in a Globe and Mail interview, she began The Black Gold Tapestry, completing it a decade later.
Sawatzky’s next piece, Back to the Garden, will feature nine panels depicting flora and fauna of the Western provinces along with text from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan and from Joni Mitchell’s songs. It will mark a shift from the darker tones of The Age of Uncertainty.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” said Sawatzky.
While she doesn’t see much hope for humanity if people continue to rely on unempathetic leaders, Sawatzky takes comfort in the courage and non-violent traditions of her Mennonite ancestors.
“I sometimes think my job in life is to be present in this time and to be a good steward. Religion has always been a big current in my life,” said Sawatzky, who identifies as a “secular Mennonite.” “[It’s] a pathway … for how to live with others and within this natural world.”
Sandra Sawatzky’s panel on environment and climate change. Photo: John DeanSandra Sawatzky’s panel on surveillance. Photo: John DeanSandra Sawatzky’s panel on war. Photo: John DeanSandra Sawatzky’s panel on inequality. Photo: John Dean
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