Sailing, the sea, the wind and the weather resonate with Bettina Matzkuhn, a textile artist with a new exhibition at the Maple Ridge Art Gallery.
Her father was a keen sailor who loved sailing for the beauty, joy, and freedom it gave him. As well as the feeling of belonging to a community.
Matzkuhn was an only child. The good thing about being an only child, she will tell you, is that her parents would drag her everywhere and take the time to explain things to her.
“My father always used to look at the barometer and check the weather report and look outside,” said Matzkuhn.
“He was always good about showing me the charts where we were sailing,” she said.
Her mother used to sew, so textiles are part of her history too.
Matzkuhn’s new exhibition called An Extended Outlook features her work depicting weather events, ocean paths and images of the biosphere.
There will be three sets of embroidered sails that she made over a number of years. One has a tide atlas embroidered on it with arrows showing the direction of the tide. Another sail has a cloud atlas on it.
“There is a real communal knowledge,” explained Matzkuhn of the sailing community.
“You’ld go to a little harbour somewhere and there’ld be other sailboats and you’ld chat with (the sailors),” she said reflecting back to when she would travel on the boat with her father. The sailors, she said, would share weather warnings with each other about avoiding particular reefs or corners where the wind was blowing hard.
“When you are sailing you have to be aware of the weather and that extends to anybody who lives on the land,” she said.
Another of her sails is covered in patches, referencing the old sailing ships at a time when sails had to be mended.
Then Matzkuhn wanted to learn more about weather.
“I started looking at weather symbols and there are so many nuances to those symbols like fog where you can see the sky but not ahead of you or fog that’s increased in the past hour or decreased or freezing ice crystals in the fog,” explained Matzkuhn.
“I mean they are very very particular symbols for all these things,” she continued.
The artist found a man online who teaches about the weather and decided to spend two days with him where he showed her his process along with the maps he uses.
This inspired her next piece of work called The Funnel.
He explained that the lines on a weather map that are like concentric circles that are really close together that are referred to as steepness.
“So as soon as he said that I could picture it and he said if the lines are really close together it means really bad weather and it always involves flying cows and Volvo’s,” Matzkuhn laughed, saying that it inspired her to search for cow and Volvo buttons for her work.
“I couldn’t find a Volvo so I got a school bus,” she said.
“People were asking me about it yesterday, a weather guy would immediately understand why they are in there,” she added.
He also showed her projections of the earth in a flattened form called The Waterman Butterfly. This inspired Matzkuhn’s Schmetterlinge or butterfly series because of the shape of the projections.
“It looks like a butterfly but the work is about weather data and it is illustrated on this butterfly form. And what I like is that people come up to it and they go, oh, a butterfly. And then after a little while they go, no, this isn’t a butterfly,” said Matzkuhn, when they can see the scientific data on them.
Matzkuhn has worked in textiles for more than 40 years with an emphasis on embroidery and fabric collage.
At the exhibit there will be samples for people to feel and one of the butterflies will be sewn up to show how they each make a globe. There will also be a short animated film made by Matzkuhn with an arts council grant about weather and Matzkuhn’s childhood relationship with weather.
On March 17 Matzkuhn will be giving a free talk from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. about her process of thinking through her work, explaining how she made her sail series and the meanings of some of the maps.
The show runs until April 12 at the ACT Art Gallery, 11944 Haney Place in Maple Ridge.
Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and select evenings.
For more information go to theactmapleridge.org.