Visiting Artists

Ann James Tribute

February 7. 2014

Although Ann James had studied in England as a painter, her artistic career was truly launched in Regina, a small but progressive city located on the wheat growing plains of western Canada. It was here that she took classes with the prolific ceramist Jack Sures starting in 1965. By her own admission, she "did everything that was wrong apparently according to ... Bernard Leach," making off-beat floral and figurative compositions, using coloured clays and low-fire glazes.

Clay suited James' life-long interest in process, which she described to Joan Murray as a concern with "the moment between actual thought and the happening of the work." An encounter with American Edward Kienholz, who stayed with her in Regina at the time of his radical 1966 exhibition at the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, exposed her to the emerging West Coast funk aesthetic. James found in Kienholz's socially charged assemblages a confirmation of the direction she was taking in her figurative work. An exhibition at the Regina Public Library Art Gallery in 1968 showed her potential to upset aesthetic and social standards with amorphous clay sculptures and sardonic commentaries on women "being treated as furniture" in female figure-chairs, such as What's A Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?. Leaving for London in 1969, she began using rigid polyurethane foam after seeing the insulating material used by workers at the Saint Katherine's Docks.

The astounding figurative work that ensued was included in a flurry of exhibitions including Osaka 70 in Japan, London Now in Berlin and a solo exhibition at the Courtauld Institute in London. She continued to work with foam, creating a series of sculptures based on prostitutes she had encountered in English pubs.

In 1972 she had a solo exhibition at Canada House Gallery, where she ventured into installation art, creating a space out of hanging foam cobweb's, a commentary on environmental degradation. Back in Regina later that year, she continued to work, attracting to her side young women ceramic artists who had become disaffected with the local university's program.

An outgoing and gregarious woman, James socialized and exhibited with a circle of homebred Saskatchewan artists who affectionately referred to her as the "Godmother." Reflecting on the unlikelihood of their association, James notes, "Victor Cicansky, like he says, comes from the garlic flats" he's Romanian, Russell Yuristy is Ukrainian, Joe Fafard is French and I have the British background, I was brought up in London. I feel like a fish out of water quite often here. When the boys get excited about "just feel that forty below and just breathe that fresh air in, I want to bury myself."

A truly independent and original artist, her work left an indelible impression on Canadian art of the 1970s. She will be remembered for her fearless embrace of new sculptural media and for her equally fearless questioning of attitudes connected with the era's most controversial social issues.

Timothy Long, Head Curator
MacKenzie Art Gallery
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada