“...making art became an exercise in concentrated, creative resilience in the face of overwhelming challenges”

In an introduction to pieces by Catherine currently hanging at Confederation Centre Art Gallery, I read this today:

Our first Island Focus shines a spotlight on the work of artist, educator and activist Catherine Miller (1963-2020).

Heretofore I’d not seen Catherine reflected posthumously like this, and it came as a something of a shock, the finality of it all, especially in the context of her work as an artist. 

“That’s all,” it says. That’s a lot. It took some of my breath away.

Curator Pan Wendt wrote a very nice introduction to the two pieces of Catherine’s work, finishing with:

Her exhibition Catherine Miller: Changing Environs, shown at Confederation Centre Art Gallery in 2013, included the work Rising Sea Level, P.E.I., five woven wall hangings that use rusting iron nails to represent the shifting terrain of Prince Edward Island in the context of climate change. In 2018, while fighting the effects of cancer, Miller embarked on a more personal project, documenting her day-to-day preoccupations and activities in hanging texts woven from cotton and silk thread. In both projects, making art became an exercise in concentrated, creative resilience in the face of overwhelming challenges.

I’d never seen the two pieces as being thematically similar, but Pan is right: she followed her work on the deeply political overwhelming challenge of climate change with deeply personal reflections on the overwhelming challenge of living with cancer.

It was indeed “concentrated, creative resilience.”

The two pieces on view are ones Catherine was particularly proud of, and ones that involved hundreds of hours of labour.

For the first, Rising Sea Level, Catherine hand-wove five panels from undyed cotton, working rusty nails into the fabric in an outline of Prince Edward Island, with the Island shrinking, due climate change, in each successive panel.

Catherine Miller Rising Sea Level, 2010; undyed cotton, hand-drawn nails, plaster. Gift of the Estate of Catherine Miller, 2024.

She auditioned many different types of nails before she found the ones that rusted as they did in her imagination.

For the second piece, Lists of Life, she stitched words over fishing net (using a dissolvable medium for initial stability).

Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

The lists are ones I recognize from the life we lived together. It’s both odd and delightful to see these  artifacts immortalized.

Some are a testament to the emotional labour she bore (labour that, more often than not, was opaque and unrecognized, both by me, and by the community around her), like this one:

Detail from Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

Others are a testament to the things she never got to do, like this one:

Detail from Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

Again, “that’s all.”

While the larger Together With Time exhibition will be on view until April 5, 2026, Catherine’s contributions will rotate out as part of the “Island Focus” section by the end of November. I encourage you to visit them.

(It’s fitting that this exhibition is the last to be mounted under the tenure of retiring gallery director Kevin Rice, who was  such a strong supporter of Catherine’s work).