Martha Sturdy wasn’t interested in a retrospective of her diverse and successful career as an artist.
The part-time, long-term Pemberton resident (and mother of West Vancouver-Sea to Sky MLA Jordan Sturdy) has spent the last six decades following her innate interests, from wearable art—big, bold jewelry featured in the pages of Vogue—to furniture and large-scale sculptures crafted from wood, resin, steel, and plastic.
Over the years, it has earned her accolades ranging from the Governor General’s Golden Jubilee Medal to an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University where she earned her BFA.
“I have made a rule—it was a positive and a negative—I decided that I was not going to go and look at everybody else’s work,” Sturdy says over Zoom from the West Vancouver Art Museum. “The reason is I didn’t want to be influenced. I wanted to do what I believed in and what I think.”
There’s one exception. The pieces featured in her new exhibit, Martha Sturdy: All Fall Down, which opened on Wednesday, Oct. 19 and runs until Dec. 17 at the West Vancouver Art Museum, were directly influenced by nature—more specifically, the old growth cedar trees on her Pemberton farm.
“Somebody asked me, ‘Where did you get the idea of burning wood?’ Of course, if you look in my woods, you see where I got the idea,” she says, laughing. “I’m copying the forest. I’m copying nature.”
The wood sculptures that make up the exhibit are created from salvaged wood plucked from that forest. Sturdy, who is 80 years old and keeps deliberately fit, took part in moving all the pieces to the museum. They were burned over a fire to evoke the charred snags left behind after a blaze.
“At my barn I build a fire and then I take pieces of wood, sometimes up to 15-feet-long, and I pull them through the fire,” Sturdy describes. “I personally wear gloves and I pull them and twist them and burn them and take them out, and cool them off, then burn them at the other end. So it has that texture … Then what I did is I would take them out of the fire, I would hose them off and then dry them, then I would take them into my workshop and I would put a light coat of resin on them to make them permanent… Then I did a matte finish, so they’re not shiny. They really look just the way a forest fire looks. That was what I was trying to replicate.”
All Fall Down 1, for example, is made up of five of those large, burned pieces attached to slabs of steel, which is meant to evoke the cracked earth. Sturdy went to great lengths to create an atmosphere for the show: wind sounds are piped in, lights were removed to create dramatic lighting—and cast eerie shadows—and the ambient light from outside was blacked out.
“She’s been working in wood for a while, but this is new for her,” says curator Hilary Letwin. “It’s not really something that she said people have seen out in public. People will have a conception of her and her work, and there are certain things that are very much in keeping with her other material work. She’s still working as a minimalist, that’s not changed—sometimes the scale has not changed—but other things are different; the material in particular. So I think it’s very exciting to have this opportunity to show this new work of Martha’s.”
While it’s an exhibit that centres on the charred remains of cedar trees, its message isn’t necessarily about climate change. Some of the trees in her backyard have burned rings inside them, dating forest fires that ripped through the area 300 or 400 years ago.
“I wanted to talk about forest fires from a different point of view than climate change,” she adds.
Aesthetically, Sturdy liked the textures burned wood created, but she also wanted the show to offer a kernel of hope. She primarily tried to achieve that with the sculpture sitting outside the museum, called All Fall Down 4.
“This show is so aggressively negative,” she says. “You walk in here and it’s just like being in a burned forest, and it is pretty serious … But then you go outside and there’s this little tree under this pile of wood. Nature will help us if we help nature. I’m just a reminder of that.”
