This meaning is underscored by a central symbol of the series' four pieces: smocking, a textile art closely associated with the dress-up clothing of little girls of the 1960s, my era. As I see it, smocking carries interestingly mixed meanings. Yes, smocking is an art, a highly decorative labour of love; but at the same time, it is inelastic, restrictive, and role-defining. The stitched bodices of those 'sweet little dresses' can actually corset a child, limiting physical and emotional exploration. However, when the smocked bodices is cut open -- as in Heirloom Revisited's large piece -- the child can break free of her restraints. In fact, once beyond their reach, the grown child may even look back upon smocking's restrictions with nostalgic affection -- just as many now regard the pretty-pretty puffed-sleeved baby dresses of our youth.

In addition to textile assemblage of smocked cloth, Heirloom Revisited includes an image of a mother and child (colour xerograph on canvas) as well as the expressive textures and colours of oil, acrylic, and encaustic paint.

This series consists of a large triptych seen here in full and detail, plus three small multi-panel pieces, Heirloom Fragment: Pink (again, seen in full and detail, Blue, and Green.

These works are an addendum to my Heirloom Series about my grandparents.

I initially took on this piece as a commitment to my Grade 9 students at the Linden School, a girls' school where I taught in 1997 as an Artist in Education for the Ontario Arts Council. The school wanted these students to focus their art work (collages being developed according to my "Working From the Family" framework) on the topic of 'Mothers and Daughters'. I promised them I, too, would make a piece on the theme in question.

The challenge was to find a personally authentic way to interpret motherhood, while meeting other criteria. For one, I wanted the new work to have obvious visual links to The Heirloom Series. And so I decided to re-use the dimensions of the earlier works -- 6 feet by 10 feet in two panels. As well, I echoed the earlier series in scale and placement of the work's key visual: large and centred on the left panel.

But the new work also needed to reflect five years of changes in my concerns and working practices. For instance, I was now at least as interested in texture as I had been in image, a pre-occupation of the earlier series. Why the shift? In part because I could no longer access the equipment necessary to make huge photo emulsion enlargements. For the new work, I created just one large image using colour reprography heat-transferred onto canvas. Textile assemblage and wax would provide the texture I craved.

On the work's theme, while I was interested in exploring notions of motherhood, I was no longer working with explicitly personal material. That meant that my piece would need to have archetypal resonances. Accordingly, I worked with an old slide of my father's that depicted my mother/Everywoman gently supporting her child's first steps. Many years before I'd seen a version of this gesture in a Rembrandt drawing of the 1600s. The pose my father captured differed only in the clothing.

The clothing itself was important, since the child's puffed-sleeved attire evoked the smocked dresses of my early youth. And so I incorporated smocking as a symbol. Of young girlhood. Of a mother's loving work on her child's behalf. Of the constraints of social expectations -- that a girl be sugar and spice, nice, for instance. And ultimately, of the possibility of cutting loose from these expectations, just as the smocked fabric is cut in two where it bridges two panels of the triptych. I added a third panel to the piece when I found that the exuberant energy of the emerging 'child' -- represented by a great long swath of soaring smocked cloth -- required more space than the two panels provided.

Please contact me with any questions you might have about this series.

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