Blog # 35…July 2014

In 2004 when Izzy Camilleri was approached to design a winter wrap for Toronto Star reporter Barbara Turnbull, her eyes were opened to a totally new way of thinking about fashion. Barbara arrived at Izzy’s studio in a wheelchair which she’d been using since 1983 when her spinal cord was severed by a gunshot fired during a robbery of the convenience store where she was working. She wanted something to keep warm in her chair that would be easy to get in and out of and… she longed for something beautiful. 

Izzy had never considered the difficulties of dressing for sitting but jumped at the challenge and over the past decade, has created a whole new adaptive line. She met with and listened to many people who are wheelchair users and has developed patterns and skills at cutting, placing seams and closures to ensure comfort and fit.  The garments must be easy to put on and take off for the wearer and/or their helper, they need the room and shape to accommodate sitting without extra material to bunch and they should sit smoothly over the shoulders…rather like we all want our clothes to fit. She didn’t want to sacrifice style or beauty either, using materials like leather, fur, silk and velvet. 

Although there are many different body shapes amongst her clients, she uses the concept of designing for an L shaped body rather than an I shape, in other words, the shape of someone sitting. Another important notion is placing the opening at the back of shirts and jackets so the arms go in straight forward and the clothing wraps around and fastens at the back where no one sees it anyway.

People with disabilities are marginalized in so many ways and face so many challenges, large and small that it’s wonderful to see some attention being paid to both the practicalities and the esthetics of their clothing.  And, Izzy Camilleri is now moving into designing for the aging population who want smart comfortable items that suit their figures and their tastes.

There’s a delicious small show just opened on the 4^th level of the Royal Ontario Museum called Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting,  a collaboration by Barbara Turnbull, Izzy Camilleri and Alexandra Palmer, Fashion and Textile curator at the ROM, on until January 2015…worth a visit.  

Also, Judith Thompson‘s play Borne, featuring actors who are wheelchair users is playing at Soulpepper Theatre this week.

Blog 34…June 2014

I was lucky to be born early enough to be forced to learn 200 lines of poetry every year at school. It’s one of the things I value most about my education, although it didn't mean much to me at the time and was confined to the 18^th and 19^th century English poets, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Mathew Arnold - Rupert Brooke was the most modern and Bliss Carmen the only Canadian. Many of those lines still circle around in my head, called up by something I read or hear.

Now I enjoy seeing contemporary situations and events being interpreted with poetry... expressing, exploring and expanding our feelings about what’s around us as we struggle to make sense of things. When Mustafa Ahmed’s close buddy was shot and killed in Toronto, his response was a tough and moving poem that finished “Those friends may be close but they don’t know the chambers of your heart”. Cuban born, Boston based physician Rafael Campo uses poetry to help his patients (and himself) contain emotions and find metaphors for pain. Renee Sarojini Saklikar, who lost several relatives in the horror of the Air India crash, composed a series of poems as an elegy to the 82 children who died. There’s even a group of Toronto poets who love mixed martial arts and find poetry in its conflict and movements.

In 2011, in an effort to diminish the “intellectually brutalizing” affects of medical school and stimulate creativity, Yale University and University College London joined together to establish an annual poetry competition for their students with a generous prize. The poems help students develop abstract thinking and realize the commonality and universality of their experience.

In downtown Toronto, The Secret Handshake is a peer support cultural centre presenting a gathering spot and daily programmes of dance and movement and visual arts. Once a month, on a Sunday evening, established poets read alongside individuals struggling with mental illness. Traditional medical treatment only takes people part way to recovery, words and other means of communication free and extend emotions and diminish isolation by linking the artists and the audience with emotions we all feel. 

I’ve consoled many young girls turning thirty with Ogden Nash’s lines “How old is Spring Miranda?” and made toasts borrowing from Shakespeare with  “But if the while I think on thee dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.” from Sonnet XXX.  The holiday season isn’t complete without listening to Dylan Thomas’s resounding voice deliver A Child’s Christmas in Wales. 

As well as many other wise things she said, the angelic Maya Angelou told us that poetry is music for the human voice. Whether it’s a limerick, a sonnet, haiku, a villanelle or a piece of doggerel on a Hallmark card, poetry gives us a way to express what we’re feeling and thinking when other words fail us. 

Blog 33...May 2014

Public art, just the refreshment we need as we move through our cluttered lives.  Meandering through the beautiful and tranquil Poltesco Valley in Cornwall last month (lucky me) on our way to the coastal footpath, we spotted this small bench with beautiful subtle fish carved along its edge. We noticed it was dedicated to someone who must have loved the walk too so we sat down and thought of him and what he might have been like.

Mr Pankhurst's bench

Watchful  owls

Then later that day, strolling down to Kennack Sands, I saw these figures peeking out through a garden hedge...a creative use of tree stumps.

It's one thing to find objets in the countryside but what about coming across them in a city…London for instance. Trafalgar Square, always one of my destinations…noon hour concerts in St Martin-in-the-Fields, Canada House (alas, no longer a friendly welcome there though) has a  wonderful feeling of gathering people together.

This time there's a surprize... Empty for 150 years, the fourth plinth (the north/west one) surrounding Nelson’s column has been waiting for an historical figure to join the other three. Since early 2000, the space has been offered to contemporary artists for a temporary display of their work.  The current piece is a giant electric blue cockerel by Katharina Fritsch, an interesting companion for the conventional sculptured gentlemen already in place.

How does he do that?

          

         

         
     

       Then we turned a                
       corner and saw this dude...

       and several other metallically clad
       figures who stayed very still, then startled us 

       with a tiny twitch

Streetscape

Lighting fixture inside 

The snazziest new shop in London, opened in March in Covent Garden is Lululemon…with features designed, produced and shipped over by Brothers Dressler, the Toronto studio well known for their unique ways of re-purposing wood and creating  beautiful spaces

You don't have to go to London to see a creation of Dressler’s... in the newest section of Yorkdale, the Toronto shopping mall.is another Lululemon, with a fabulous façade composed of hundreds of small wooden squares stained and arranged to form a huge stylized maple leaf. Worth the trip up there.

Thanks to Karen Kenny and Norm Nicholls for the photos

Blog 32…April 2014

A while ago the director of the American Museum of Natural History announced that there were 3 million jobs in the US unfilled because there weren’t people with qualifications in science to take them.  Although science is fascinating and the basis of all our life forces, it seems to have a bad or at least conflicted rap with the general public…. not to mention the disdain of our own federal government.

Until the 80’s when people like Isaac Azimoff and Carl Sagan and our own David Suzuki started writing books and making TV shows about science, a lot of it was considered too difficult for most of us to understand.  Science is complex, but like any other complex thing, it can be broken down and approached logically and sequentially. A well organized person who knows his stuff can introduce us to it gradually and make us fall in love with the wonder of the world around us, how it’s evolved and how it works. And packaged in a medium we recognize like film or TV takes the material to a wider audience, kids in particular.

The latest artist to take up the cause is actor Alan Alda who delivered a plenary session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago in February titled Getting beyond a Blind Date with Science. He chided scientists about using jargon that is perplexing rather than impressive, encouraging them to speak in clear, straightforward terms as much as possible without dumbing it down.  He also urges those of us in the general public to persist with a commitment to explore and understand, ask questions, be curious.

Cosmos, the TV show originally hosted by Carl Sagan, has re- emerged with Neil Degrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium acting as host…totally appropriate since he’s a protégé of Sagan’s. It’s just about half way into a 13 week series, so it’s a good place to start your love affair with science. There are also CBC radio’s Quirks and Quarks and The Nature of Things, David Suzuki’s long running CBC TV show.

Inside the Large Hadron Collider 

Jubilant scientists outside the LHC

                 

A recent documentary Particle Fever, about the Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of the Higgs bosun is filmed as a thriller, keeping us on the edges of our seats at the sight of the gigantic LHC and the scientists around the world working feverishly in their labs. The suspense of the initial failure and second successful attempt is followed by a touching look at Peter Higgs wiping tears from his eyes at the moment his {or God’s) particle was found. 

Science can be challenging, even scary, easier to tune in to Net flicks than inform ourselves about climate change. The enthusiasm of David Suzuki and Neil Degrasse Tyson for science and how it touches all of us helps us deal with the unknown unknowns (remember that?...) always more scary than the known unknowns. 

Blog 31…March 2014

“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”… I like lots of Emma Goldman’s notions, maybe this one most of all. I saw a couple of flamenco films a while ago and was moved once again by the passion of those gypsy rhythms and the sense that it’s not just a dance but a central force of life. Salsa to classical ballet, hip-hop to whirling dervishes, alone or together in all kinds of weather, dance gets us up, gets us moving. That got me thinking about how dance has become the exercise of choice for some groups that you won’t meet on a regular dance floor or see on Dancing with the Stars.

As our population ages, the challenge to provide activity and support of many different kinds to our fellow citizens is gaining attention. One of the conditions that seems to be on the rise is Parkinson’s Disease, which, as it progresses, affects physical, psychological and social function.   

Dance with Parkinson’s is one inventive way to counter the imposed limitations and the movement is growing both here in Toronto and around the world. Using both choreographed and improvisational motion, the sessions provide a safe and enjoyable setting to improve core strength, balance, posture and gracefulness.  Often using live music, the groups can present a wide range of style and tempo, everyone working at their own speed, range and energy for that day. The instructors are trained to modify the dance to each individual’s level of comfort and ability, the music acting as an external cue to facilitate movement. 

Dance is also useful for individuals with dementia; music seems to unlock memory of movement, sometimes song lyrics do too, enabling people to sing even though they’re not able to speak.  Benefits to the cardiovascular as well as the psychological and emotional systems are valuable side effects.  Engaging in a normal activity, one that may evoke pleasant memories can be healthy and comforting for both the individuals and their friends and families.  So much has been lost; it’s encouraging to concentrate on what remains.

Dance is also making an appearance in prisons.  On Valentine’s Day, a group of inmates, both male and female, in a San Francisco jail danced as part of One Million Rising, a world wide event aimed at ending domestic violence. In  New York state, convicted murderers, drug dealers and sex offenders are put through their paces by an instructor who works their muscles and their minds to exhaustion…beats sewing mail bags, soon to be an obsolete task anyway.

So, let’s dance in whatever way we can, with whoever’s handy or by ourselves, wherever and whenever we have a chance to… it’s good for us.

Blog 30…February 2014

The beauty in ordinary objects…Mary Pratt’s show, on now at the McMichael Gallery, is full of wonderful glimpses of the world she saw around her as she kept house and tended children in an isolated corner of Newfoundland in the 60’s…always seeing - and painting - that world through an artist’s eyes. 

Meanwhile, two young Toronto artists who both work in wood have also developed a fascination with the beauty of ordinary forms and functional objects, the delicate place furniture holds between engineering and fine art and the many ways wood has been used over the years.  

 

Invited to contribute to SMALL, a show that opened in the vitrines at Harbourfront last month, they took their inspiration from a photo that they discovered online from the Museum of Gears dating back to late 1800's

Prior to the development of modern casting methods, wooden patterns were used for gears, pressed into wet sand to make a mould which was then filled with liquid iron or other molten metals.  The gears were an important part of the heavy machinery that was in production following the industrial revolution. 

Finding a surprising beauty in these patterns, Carey Jernigan and Julia Campbell-Such began to conceive and render images of the moulds with off- cuts of wood found in the shops where they work.  The result is a remarkable display of an old form with both the charm of natural material and the spare elegance of an object important to the industry of its time. As well as nostalgia for that time when craft was done with care by hand, the show incorporates the economy of using discarded material in a creative way. 

                                                    

Seeing everyday objects as having an inner beauty that amplifies their importance and use in everyday life has long been a standard in aboriginal art too, as has using available materials to create traditional objects both valued and essential to everyday life.  Check out the Raybans.

Blog 29…January 2014

The film Gabrielle, in general release this week was Canada’s entry in the foreign language Oscars this year…it  didn’t make the short list but it’s definitely worth seeing for director Louise Archambault’s sensitive and realistic handling of the many issues of independence faced by individuals with disabilities.   

It made me think of a couple of involvements I had many years ago in Quebec during my life as an occupational therapist.  I handled the publication of CJOT, (Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy) and we chose as printer L’Atelier des Sourdes, a shop in Montreal that trains and employs deaf people – not being bothered by the noise in a print shop was an added benefit I guess.  My second discovery (and this was in the 70’s) was a shop, on a fashionable street, also in Montreal, that marketed beautiful articles made by people attending a centre that helped them deal with mental health problems.  Both the print shop and the store were taking creative approaches to help people make the most of their abilities, allowing them to enter the mainstream in a unique way - amongst the forerunners in a number of other activities taking this approach now.

But back to Gabrielle… the title role is played by a young woman with Williams syndrome, a form of neurological disorder that features expressive language skills and a strength and fondness for music as well as distinct learning disabilities.  Les Muses de Montreal is a choir of developmentally challenged adults, again played not by actors but real individuals (they keep their own names in the production) who are not only talented but extremely endearing for their enthusiasm and sense of community. Gabrielle and her fellow musicians struggle with the issues of maturing and seeking independence with the common ground of singing together (and with Robert Charlebois, it’s a real treat to see him interacting with the singers around his song Ordinary Guy).

We first meet Gabrielle as she’s falling in love with Martin, a fellow singer. Their love affair and wish for autonomy is met with resistance by their families who express their feelings with loaded phrases like “people like them”. Archambault uses a fictional approach with a touching performance by Gabrielle Marion-Rivard at the centre of the piece.  Her wishes to be normal, to have her own apartment and a love life like everyone else are expressed in a natural and unaffected way that brought a lump to my throat.  Gabrielle’s story challenges our notions of what’s normal and who fits the definition. It also reiterates and celebrates the power of music to erase the borders and bring us all together even if only for the length of a song.