From afar, Mary-Anne Wensley’s installation, inescapable
shelter glows peacefully and appears to be constructed of a thin
parchment-like material. But, on further inspection, there’s a sense of
the grotesque—the translucent material is actually dried pig
intestine. “I struggle with the definitive ‘why’ that I work with this
material,” Wensley says. “It’s almost like the material has chosen me.
I’m continually fascinated by it and continually repulsed by it.”
Inescapable shelter consists of a small, garden-shed-sized house
built of bricks, made from the dried intestines and hanging nets of
small rings of intestine tied together. Blooming in the
corners—easily missed—are small tufted plants Wensley constructed
from the ends of the tubes, not wanting to waste any pieces.
She buys the sausage casings from Brothers Meats on Agricola and
hangs them on a clothesline in her home for a few hours to dry. “When
they dry, the light is incredible, they kind of glow from within,”
Wensley says, showing a photo of the ghostly looking tubes hanging. The
price of the casings went up 30 percent midway through the project:
“Due to market issues that I was going to investigate more, but didn’t
have the chance to,” she says. Though not a vegetarian, Wensley
confesses to not eating a lot of meat and doesn’t find the smell of
bacon particularly appetizing during times she’s creating with wet
casings.
Wensley first began working with pig intestines as a student at the
Ontario College of Art and Design. She stuffed them with everyday
detritus—bus passes, clothing labels, money, receipts. In 2001, she
came to Halifax for the MFA program at NSCAD. She then continued
working with the material and in 2002, she created similar sausages
stuffed with assorted objects in the windows of Eyelevel Gallery, at
their former Barrington location.
For her graduating exhibition at NSCAD’s Anna Leonowens Gallery, she
used wet intestines to “write” on the walls, tossing pieces onto the
walls and forming them into an “implied language”—mainly squiggles
that appeared to be words. The pieces that were formed into real words
were visceral ones, like “bite” and “chew.”
“What runs through my work is the vulnerability of the body,
anxiety, pain and feeling restrained,” Wensley says.
She first used the idea of a shelter when creating a piece for a
group show curated by a NSCAD classmate about reactions to September
11. Brave New World showed at Anna Leonowens in 2006. Her piece,
“Safe Houses,” consisted of numerous tiny houses made of thin, dried
pieces of pig intestine. Wensley wanted to try using the material in a
different way, forming it into shapes.
“I wanted to work with the idea of safe houses,” she says, for
criminals, during war times and on the Underground Railroad, “but it’s
also undermining the idea: You can’t be totally safe.” The clusters of
houses made her think of “refugee camps and army camps.”
After drying the intestines, she cuts them into segments and irons
them to make the flattened parchment-like pieces that the house in
Saint Mary’s gallery is built from. Wensley then meticulously cuts and
glues the dried pieces to form small bricks; over 2,700 of which were
used to build the house. It’s a continuation of the project begun with
the “Safe Houses.” She wants the viewer to be surrounded by the piece.
Working on it, Wensley was considering the relationship of her work to
the body, the close genetic relationship of pigs to humans and
mortality. The “scab-like pieces” that make up the nets that hang from
the ceiling represent a “desire to be safe,” alluding to fear and
“trying to be brave.”
The idea of shelter seems to be predominant in local consciousness
lately, with houses, trailers and Cold War fallout shelters appearing
in recent shows. Saint Mary’s also mounted the exhibition Burrow around this theme last summer. Local artist Adriana Kuiper created a
shelter for that show and a tunnel-like structure on the Dalhousie
campus during October’s Nocturne festival. Is it the era, the cruel
climate or fear of another Halifax Explosion that’s motivating this
work? Wensley nods in recognition of her peers—her pigskin house is
scant protection against the maritime winds and rains.
Mary-Anne Wensley’s inescapable shelter runs until April 11 at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, 923 Robie.
Artist talk and catalogue launch: Thursday, April 2, 8pm.
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2009.
