Today we met the artist, Margie McDonald, who has a new exhibit of art made of mined materials on view at the Britannia Mine Museum north of Vancouver. If you get a chance, take a drive up along the Sea to Sky Highway through the forests, along the coast with incredible views of the inlet, and in the bask of hot sun shimmering off the rock cliffs and snow still on distant mountains. Then plan to spend time at the museum and in the old building housing her art.
Margie uses metals, copper mostly, to make abstract sculptures of amazing beauty and intensity. She weaves metal wires of diverse colors into complex objects that reflect her initial training as a rigger for boats in Port Townsend, Washington. She tells me that about ten years ago she grew tired of rigging and so turned her attention to rigging sculptures with wire. The result is, in this exhibit, a corpus of works of dream-like sinuosity and startling originality.
I could write more; but why when a few pictures tell more than all the sentence I wish I could write to do her work justice. Here are a few.
My pictures do not do her work justice. So please go see them yourself and enjoy the skill of using mined materials in the service of beauty.
We must also congratulate Scott Kerr who is the Program & Exhibit Coordinator of the museum and his colleagues for organizing this exhibit, and for vitalizing the museum so that today’s visit with the grandkids was great fun for all of us from five to sixty-five.
