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In Western Canada, women sculptors render visible the weight of hidden labour with industrial materials
Vancouver-based Vanessa Brown's 2016 body of work The Hand of Camille calls into question the visibility of women and their erasure from art histories and institutions. Brown's exhibition-titled after 19th-century French sculptor Camille Claudel, whose work was largely overshadowed by her lover Auguste Rodin and remained in relative obscurity until the mid-20th century-reflects on the often-invisible labour that comprises art- and exhibition-making through a series of sculptures fabricated primarily in steel. Executed in delicate geometric and figurative forms, the works push their thin armatures to stretch beyond the conventional semiotics of steel-which attribute weight and dimension as indicators of success-and instead evoke the subtleties and tactility of the medium. A simultaneous exploration of form and of the gendered idiosyncrasies involved in working with industrial materials, The Hand of Camille poetically reinserts the female hand that produces as a counter to those other hands that have often appeared more visibly.
The subject of visibility is of considerable relevance to women artists working in sculpture with industrial materials. In some cases, women are highly visible, by virtue of the anxieties of working in mostly male spaces or with mostly male fabricators. In others, they are hardly visible at all. They exist as preparators and artist assistants whose labours and hands fade into the background, or as artists in their own right, whose works are nonetheless unacknowledged or underappreciated. While Brown's practice operates within a unique set of historical, political and...