“In those trancelike moments, I wondered at the personal nature of perception,” writes Nova Scotian artist, Dawn MacNutt, on being transfixed as a child by the light streaming through her grandmother’s coloured stained glass windows, in a new memoir and exhibition catalogue, Timeless Forms.
Her book coincides with the artist’s sprawling retrospective show by the same name, which opens at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery on Saturday, Jan 18 and runs until Apr 12.
The show follows MacNutt’s wonderfully woven oeuvre of nearly five decades, through a selection of her sculptural and textile works—beginning with the tapestry, “Once Upon A Time,” from 1975.
MacNutt was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia in 1937, “just a mile from where I live now,” she writes in her memoir. She recalls the vivid smells of time spent outside, from the “evocative scents of clover, cornflower and cosmos” to “the pungent smells of salt water, oil and eelgrass.” Her family lived through the war years in New Glasgow, where she began experimenting with natural dyes by making paints squeezed from flowers in her grandmother’s garden. It was then that she learned the basics of weaving—by pulling apart the opposing threads in little squares of printed silk.
“These happy early years gave me a storehouse of hope, belief, love and wonderment that sustain me still,” she writes. But she would experience pain and suffering at a young age, too, as her father left and moved to Quebec before MacNutt was 10 years old, while her mother battled diphtheria and faced mental health challenges, which the family kept secret. She writes, a “balm to my young soul was art,” and that her greatest joy came at age 13 when she started private art lessons that she paid for herself by selling Christmas cards door to door.
She writes that while her early years “instilled in me the ability to dream and gave me the desire to create, these complicated years tempered my musings and creative urges with forgiveness, empathy and a belief in redemption.”
When MacNutt moved to Sackville, New Brunswick, in 1954 to study at Mount Allison University, she confided in friends about her “tattered, imperfect childhood,” and says, “their acceptance affirmed by deep-rooted shame was unnecessary.” At Mount A, MacNutt studied psychology while minoring in fine arts. The ‘50s were “the heady years” for the Fine Arts Department at Mount A, writes MacNutt. Lawren P Harris was the department’s head, and Alex Colville was her instructor. MacNutt says Colville’s “encouragement, then and now, gave me ‘permission’ and confidence to pursue the marking of art, against all odds.”
MacNutt received a Master’s of Social Work from Dalhousie University in 1970; by then, she was already married with three kids. She continued to weave and create throughout her career as a social worker, but it wasn’t until the late ‘90s that she made the leap to being a full-time artist.
Since then, she exhibited in over a hundred shows, both locally and internationally, and her work has been commissioned in places like the IWK Children’s Hospital, the Town of Sackville, New Brunswick, Alderney Gate and the Dartmouth General Hospital. She has been inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, is a Master Artisan of Craft Nova Scotia and a longstanding member of the International Sculpture Center. Her works are the delight of many permanent collections, including at the MSVU Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Canadian Museum of History, the Owens Art Gallery at Mount A and the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York, founded by her “great mentor,” the textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen, who was very influential.
MacNutt met Larsen in 1979. After she showed him her early portfolio, he told her, “You are an artist. You must come to New York.” He would become the inspiration for MacNutt’s Kindred Spirits forms and a lifelong friend.
Five years later, MacNutt had her first major solo show, Woven Forms: Sculptural Figures, at age 37 at MSVU in 1984. Sketches of Larsen in a kimono, what he would wear to read and write in the evening in his New York loft, would inspire the life-sized, woven forms of seagrass over copper wire that appeared in that show as “Kindred Spirits.”
Walking through Timeless Forms and flipping through her book’s pages—which includes 16 personal essays—it’s clear MacNutt has been fascinated with playful yet intuitive and informed ways of seeing since she was a small child.
This profound simplicity is felt as an animated presence between MacNutt’s works within the show, spatially anchored around several of MacNutt’s important series,’ like Kindred Spirits, and Timeless Forms.
The layout, too, opens a call-and-response, or resonance, between the materials, forms and feeling from one period of her practice to the next—as copper wires woven through seagrass in one corner shimmer through illuminated strips of coloured, twined willow forms across the room, who are bending toward a line up of miniatures in woven copper wire who seem to be cueing behind a radiant, carved marble bowl—one of the few pieces that isn’t woven in the show.
“My pieces, or really, the passion is generated by feeling more than materials,” MacNutt tells The Coast about her process of creating. “But then materials dictate, and they help, because I don’t want them to be reminiscent of just one thing or one person, but rather a feeling about that experience or that person that other people can adapt—or not.”
“Vulnerability and grief are the price of love”
MacNutt has been releasing her passion through various materials over time—wool, felted fleece, fine silver, copper wire, stainless steel, seagrass, grapevine, marble, twined willow and bronze—consistently inspired by caring for and observing people, whether it’s watching strangers imitating statues in a museum in Greece, seeing her daughter’s anguish over a friend’s tragic death, comforting a dear friend who’s felt shame and judgement, remembering her mother’s beautiful dress on a train or revisiting moments within her decades as a social worker.
“When I am creating, my love of people is my richest collaborator,” writes MacNutt in her memoir. “I am fascinated by posture, gait and nuances of facial expressions.” She writes that while “it’s easy to focus on joyful, heart-bursting love,” as many of her pieces do, that’s not the whole story.
“Vulnerability and grief are the price of love,” writes MacNutt, “and also what draws us to care for people. We admire perfection in people and their accomplishments, but when someone exposes their flaws and limitations to us, rather than turning away, we are moved to compassion. I am deeply drawn to the beauty of this human frailty.”
Her woven sculptures stretch, twist, pull, bind, and release recognizable human forms—some of which “emerged without intention when I was witness to the pain and grief of others”—into postures of tension, pain, and yearning that invite you to care.
Some works at MSVU within Timeless Forms, like “In a Quiet Place,” are works made on the loom, with beautiful naturally dyed and spun wools and felted fleece depicting trees and canopies primarily suspended or hung on walls. Others are made with materials, like seagrass, twined string or copper wire, woven on the loom and given metal armatures to be freestanding, like “Giacometti, A Kindred Spirit.” Others, like “Anna Reid” and “Hidden Memory,” are MacNutt playing with imperfections in copper weaving and embedding photos of her mother and cards she received as a child.
Others are from her transition “off-loom” like “From the Land,” with MacNutt building an upright structure on each piece she makes to bend and overlap materials like copper, seagrass and wetted willow.
How does she keep the willow moist enough to bend into circular forms and weave? “I usually put them in the bathtub,” she says. “I have a lot of bird showers.”
Others still show her more recent foray into colour splashes, like “Spirit of Courage,” “Spirit of Love,” and “Spirit of Joy,” which are from her timeless forms series that she painted in commemoration of the lives lost by three women in the mass casualty event in Portapique, in April 2020.
The off-loom sculptures stand on their own. Some, like “Mother and Child,” are cast in bronze, which means MacNutt built the piece out of willow or another natural material and then cast it. This process burns up the original and is gone forever, which lends itself to imperfections.
She’d have to remake the whole thing if a piece is lost in casting. Says MacNutt, the craftspeople at Artcast Foundry in Ontario “have never lost a whole piece and they very seldom make holes in one.” But it does happen. Once, it was a head that came back with a hole in it, because MacNutt told the casters that “if you have broken areas as a result of casting, that’s part of human humanity, so by all means, leave it.”
The piece that came back had a hole in the neck, and MacNutt says her older brother was dying of throat cancer at the time, “and this was accidental.” The piece, which doesn’t appear in the MSVU show, is entitled “Requiem.” A bronze work that is undeniably broken in many places but cherished and displayed in the show is “Vigil,” which MacNutt cast herself. Another ‘broken’ casted piece, perhaps made better for it, is “Bronze Head.”
“I’m not a perfectionist,” MacNutt tells The Coast. “I believe that art is the manifestation of peculiar perception—but peculiar is such a negative word, normally.”
All the works in Timeless Forms have come to MSVU from across the province—from Pictou to Peggy’s Cove—to engage with each other again after decades.
“I’m not sure what defines the movement forward to another phase,” MacNutt tells The Coast, reflecting on the number of transitional series’ within her show.
“I tend to focus with the materials, as I have in coming and living up in rural Pictou County, but that dictated working more with willow.” MacNutt’s recent work over the past two decades comes from harvested local willow that grows along her laneway at home.
The most recent works in the show are sketches from 2023 for her latest commissioned work, an eight-foot bronze cast of a woven willow sculpture “MUSE!” that’s installed at the Pictou Culture Hub.
“I’m so curious when I see work to know, ‘Where did that come from?’”
MacNutt’s memoir and exhibition catalogue Timeless Forms was published by the MSVU Art Gallery and the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, in collaboration with Goose Lane Editions and funded by her long-time supporter and collector, the Honourable Margaret Norrie McCain.
MacNutt says the book started three years ago when her cousin Maggie McGee Kashmir gave her Marjorie Simmins’ book, Memoir: Conversations and Craft, for Christmas. “I said, ‘I love that book.’ And she said, ‘Would you consider writing a book with me about you?’”
MacNutt was humbled by it and said yes because, she tells The Coast, “I’m so curious when I see work to know, ‘Where did that come from? What did the artist feel? What was his background or hers?’ And so the stories that are part of the book relate to the work in that way.”
The book brings together over a hundred images of MacNutt’s sculptures, textiles and processes alongside personal essays where she contemplates her artistic journey: from childhood in rural Nova Scotia, through studying at Mount Allison University under Alex Colville’s instruction, to love, motherhood, heartbreak, collaboration, mentorships and friendships, trips to Greece to see simplified human forms and making the leap in her forties to leave social work aside to become a full-time time artist.
MacNutt tells The Coast of that choice: “I longed to do that, but I didn’t expect I wouldn’t make a living as an artist. So, I chose to work in social work because I love people. They have been my inspiration, always.”
MacNutt shares intimate connections between her work and life’s rawest emotions, and the tension displayed in flawed and faltering forms, which would be forever held in dialogue through her practice.
“The book doesn’t tell all, but it tells a lot—about the journey of my work and where it comes from,” MacNutt tells The Coast. “It’s my last big passion project.”
Something that isn’t in the book? MacNutt doesn’t like the colour brown. Surprising for a willow weaver. “Naturally occurring brown is one thing,” she says, “but to add brown?” Who would do such a thing?
The MSVU gallery will open the show this Saturday from 1-3pm and MacNutt will give an artist talk on Mar 8, from 1-2pm. After the show wraps up at MSVU, it will travel to St. Francis Xavier University to open in September before ending at the Owens Gallery at Mount A in early 2026.
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.