Following a Long Line
Following a Long Line negotiates themes of lineage, identity, family and migration in both spatial and temporal terms. As a series incorporating drawing, sculpture and photo-based installation, it explores movements of people and things and the broader social and cultural implications of these movements. Upheaval. Displacement. Relocation. People take immense risks to be in a better place, to break away from poverty and oppression, war and famine. This work pulls from current and historical sites of debate, but also chronicles aspects of my own heritage. It is not an objective inquiry. Rather, it registers between the political and the personal, the scientific and the poetic. It represents more an embodied knowledge drawing upon associated memories, stories and perceptions, which impact our shared experience and how we live together.
Scattering Plot: A Temple
(Kodalith images, brass shim, linen thread, fabric, grommets, aluminum tent poles)
A scatter plot is a type of mathematical diagram using coordinates to display data and possible correlations. The notion of ‘scattering plot’ suggests something more attuned to literature, a narrative device to open up a storyline or write an alternative scenario. Moving from a place. This photo-based work is made up of retractable aluminium tent poles suspending over 100 4x5 inch high contrast Kodalith images in the structure of a mobile. One tent pole is shaped as the peak of a tent or temple, bisected by another.
The images, small translucent fragments of faces and hands, gestures and glances, engage with a narrative of change and protection between mother and child. Within systems of categorization that limit agency to women and children, each image becomes a cell of information, of traceable data point. What would be standardized symbols of processing and flowcharting, Logie randomly places onto, cuts out of, or loosely renders with thread and fabric. Instead of a labelling, these markings lose their authorship, encompassing something of personhood. The women face us, interact, turn away. Working with these long considered images, Logie looks for ways to understand the social and historical processes that dictates how we treat one another.
My mother's mother's mother
(Stonehenge paper, black gesso, linen tape, thread, graphite, pins)
My mother's mother's mother is composed of three mural-sized drawings on black coated Stonehenge paper, hung edge-to-edge. The images are in two parts. Large black and white portrait-like faces dominate the upper halves, drawn partly from photographs of the women of Logie’s matrilineal ancestry. These personalized faces are transplanted over outlines of historical and cultural references – the statue of Demeter, a Victorian figurine, and a late Neolithic stone female idol. Each drawing, made up of four vertical segments, is pinned and stitched together with red and black thread. Stories Logie’s grandmother dictated to her mother are printed in graphite over lower segments of each drawing. One story tells of Logie’s great great grandmother, a Romani traveller living in the midlands of England in the mid 19th Century. Logie’s maternal grandparents left England in what is referred to as the third wave of immigration to Canada between 1890 and 1920. Logie acknowledges her family as immigrants, stemming from a long line of settlers occupying First Nations unceded territories in what is now called Canada. We took, uprooted, displaced.
Partly created in the mid 1990s, these drawings were cut and layered with other materials into a sculptural installation. Editing and reworking is an ongoing process for Logie, an act of recycling and a means of bringing relevant imagery back into her present practice.
Trestle
(Vintage Chinese shadowbox, toy train track, wood frame, mirror plexiglass, text)
The main feature of this small wall hanging sculpture is a vintage Chinese glass shadowbox, a diorama of a classic pagoda garden intricately carved in cork. Suspended upside down, the lacquered base becomes part of a bridge, the gap spanned by a piece of toy train track. Reflected in a supporting mirror, the track carries on into the void. Text written on the glass tells the story of the thousands of Chinese migrants recruited, often by forced movements, to work on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The ship journey was arduous as were the subsequent working conditions. Landing in the artist’s hometown of Port Moody between 1880 and 1885, many succumbed to Beriberi disease. Buried on the hillside overlooking the town, their bodies were later exhumed and returned to their homeland for a proper burial.