In June 2009, six Calgary creators travelled to the Château Mathieu, an 18th-century building nestled between the city of Caen and the coast of Normandy, for a curious kind of DIY residency. Now, the results—including documentation of the artists’ interventions at the château, and later pieces inspired by it—are on view at the University of Calgary’s Nickle Galleries. Among the artworks are tree roots wrapped in rich period brocades and humorous, spy-style portraits. Here, writer and curator Diana Sherlock tells Alison Cooley about the project’s origins, its on-site interventions, and some unexpected Canadian connections to commune visited.
Alison Cooley: Most Canadian artists are familiar with the Canada Council’s international residency program in Paris, but few engage in such programs in the rest of France. How did this residency come to pass?
Diana Sherlock: It was an unusual circumstance that allowed us access to the space of the Château Mathieu. Gloria Mok, one of the artists in the exhibition, has a family connection through her husband, Pierre, who is a psychiatrist in Edmonton but is from France originally. His extended family was interested in what artists could bring to the site in terms of interpretation. There’s currently a lot of reflectiveness about the family home, and this seemed to pose potential for some sort of collaboration.
Laura Vickerson had been at another residency with Gloria. She contacted me and we gathered people together a loose manner. The final group included myself, Gloria, Laura, M.N. Hutchinson, Greg Payce, and Walter May. Other than Gloria, we all work at the Alberta College of Art and Design, and have had opportunities to work with each other in the past.
The six of us decided to accept the generous offer and go to the château for a couple of weeks in June 2009. The family was amazing—they just opened the space up and they said anything that was there was for us to investigate or to incorporate in any way possible.
The château represents an incredible history of a family, but also of specific transitional moments in history. Over the period of 200 years, this family, in a personal sense, charted the shift from pre-revolutionary France to post-revolutionary France. They marked the tumultuous relationship between England and France and they witnessed the progress of the First and the Second World Wars through the occupation of France. The way we discovered this collapsed the boundaries between private and public histories.
AC: How did private and public histories come together on this site?
DS: Key family members of the Château Mathieu were scientists—some of the first geologists and botanists of the area. Alexandre Bigot, the patriarch of the family and the last permanent resident at the château, had worked to chart the whole Normandy coast in geological surveys, and his maps were used to aid the English landing on the coast during the battle for Caen in World War Two, and nobody in the family actually knew that until about four or five years ago.
The château was full of really interesting tales, and amazing collections of books, ceramics and antiques. We immersed ourselves in research for two weeks.
Afterwards, the artists spent their time making work in response to their experiences, and I did some writing. The result of that writing is a bookwork that includes a lot of historical documentation from the material at the château, and it has what I’m calling a “critical fiction” that I’ve written in the form of a travel journal. It’s a hybrid text about our experiences there. The bookwork was inspired, in part, by Pierre’s grandmother’s diary that she kept during the Second World War.
When all of the Canadians (amongst others) landed on the Normandy coast during the Second World War, their endpoint was Caen. And so the town of Mathieu was also a strategic military point during the war, as well as being important during the French Revolution. But these were also crucial moments for the individuals in that family, and I was interested in how these smaller histories overlaid larger histories, and how the social and political histories of the past continue to inform our present: maybe, sometimes even repeating themselves.
AC: An iteration of this show was up at the Esplanade Art Gallery in Medicine Hat in 2012. How has the project developed since then?
DS: The original exhibition in Canada was supposed to include some of the artifacts from the château. It eventually became apparent that that was not going to be possible, so the archival references to the collections or to the historical family photographs that I used are reproduced in the current exhibition.
There is a digital bookwork, for instance, and a number of photographs that are reproduced as vinyl wall transfers and interspersed with references to some of the artists’ studio research methods. These combined elements create a narrative section at the beginning of the exhibition, which works to span the gap between the site of the Château and the contemporary artworks that you then experience when you enter the main galleries.
The second part of the exhibition engages the white cube, and includes each of the artists’ individual interpretations of their experiences.
M.N. Hutchinson impersonated a spy while he was at the château, and spied on his collaborators (us), shooting self-portraits in the many found sets of the folly. Every day Walter May would disappear into the workshop, park or cellar, which used to be a chemistry laboratory for one of the former family members. There he would saw and hammer and hang altered prunings from trees in evocative places in the château’s architecture.
Gloria Mok spent most of her time in the 17th-century chapel or grand salon, restaging a grafted olive tree and found botanical specimens from Jacques Henry’s 1940s collection. Her final botanical collages carry the spirit and form of these early examples but use Alberta specimens. Ceramist Greg Payce did not throw a single pot while in France, but he and I spent hours delving into the rich material culture of the château, which was strangely voyeuristic, but exhilarating at the same time. Voltaire’s Candide, among other sources, became key for Greg’s final series of lenticular prints and ceramic vessels.
Laura Vickerson had brought some textiles with her to resituate in various contexts at the château, but she also worked in the back park to wrap tree roots and stumps in rich period brocades; what she calls “exterior decorating.” Although the artists’ practices vary greatly, there is a cohesiveness that emerges in the exhibition that, in my mind, has everything to do with our shared experiences in a common site.
AC: There is an interesting element of the project regarding excess, extravagance and decoration. You’ve chosen to pull this thread out by titling the show “Folly.” How are these themes represented in the show?
DS: More than anything it comes out in the display methods.
The front narrative section is a bit over the top. There are portraits, silhouettes, of each of us at the beginning of the show. The photographs by M.N. Hutchinson look like early Flemish portraiture, and are in quite ornate baroque frames, but those frames are faux. Everything about them is faux. We’re playing with value and status.
One of the things that’s fascinating about the Château Mathieu is that it’s an amazing, 200-year-old, stately home, but it’s actually a ruin. It’s very difficult to maintain. It’s excessive, but it’s also drifting into detritus, as all excess does. Even the family itself doesn’t quite know how to deal with the château’s inevitable decline.
I think there are all kinds of cycles from personal histories that are embodied in that personal space, that can be drawn out into larger public discourse. You can think about the excess of the French Revolution and its collapse, or you can think of the United States or the European Union and their impending collapse right now. I’m interested in those sorts of parallels and how they’re represented. For me, the objects and the site itself extend these larger socio-political or economic narratives.
AC: What, then, are the relationships between the sites—between Alberta and Normandy? How do these issues reflect on contemporary culture in Canada?
DS: Canada has such a strange tie to France, to Normandy. On one of our trips we went to Honfleur, the small coastal town near Mathieu from which Samuel de Champlain left to found a new French colony—now Quebec—in 1608. There’s a little plaque in the port to celebrate this, which is now surrounded by shopping and restaurants.
French colonial power has always been an influence for Canadians. And even now, you go to Normandy and you say you’re Canadian, and they love you because of what Canadians did during the Second World War. We actually have a huge presence there as an important historical figure, which is almost a reversal. We’re exotic there, even heroic!
There is definitely a dynamic relationship between the two places. Ideally I would love to show “Folly: Château Mathieu” at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, which is nestled in the centre of the ruins of William the Conqueror’s castle just across the street from where the family home was until the end of World War Two. Next project!
This interview has been edited and condensed.
This article was corrected on February 27, 2014. The original copy incorrectly indicated that Gloria Mok’s husband, Pierre, is a psychoanalyst. He is a psychiatrist.
