Home is where your house is

Home is Where your House Is, rug hooking, Laura Kenney

Marshalltown Road, Fixing it up for Maud, oil on canvas, Steven Rhude

"The AGNS has Maud's house..and when I visit the gallery it feels like Maud is present..as opposed to Marshalltown with the MacKay - Lyons memorial...Maud doesn't live there any more. "Home is where you hang your hat"...I heard that a lot being a military brat..but really it is home is where your house is...and Maud lives in Halifax." - Laura Kenney

 "When MacKay - Lyons erected his replica of the of the Lewis home in 1996, Riordon heralded it as "a modern, symbolic steel house" and noted it was the result of "a community effort that reaches beyond the borders of Digby County to embrace the whole province." The AGNS's promotional materials for the event invited interested parties to "visit the original Maud Lewis house, now carefully restored and protected, and to see many of Maud Lewis' paintings and artifacts... [at] the Scotia Bank Maud Lewis Gallery at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax."  [1]

Well, there was one lone voice that was critical of the mostly rust resistant "steel cage" memorial designed by the renowned Nova Scotian modernist. Her name was Bette Saunders of Toronto and she let it be known in a letter to the Digby Courier that the cairn was "a monstrosity and a complete insult to Ms. Lewis... While the structure may be dimensionally correct, as a memorial it should be destroyed...  The memorial makes it look like she lived in a steel cage... it is a waste of money... Whoever is responsible should be ashamed!" [2]

Bette Saunders is not alone nowadays. It may be she has morphed into an activist internet based group phenomenon that relishes the call to destroy public art, or any art for that matter. The ability to  convict artists via an unabated mock public trial, whether it pertains to Danna Schutz's painting of  Emitt Till, statues of Cornwallis, the quantum DNA of Joseph Boydon, or the Govenor General's award to Gord Downie continues. No subject or individual is sacrosanct in today's identity political arena. The carnage flows as we contemplate the war on cultural appropriation and the various activist based groups willing to tear down anything that they might find disagreeable. This is our world today - just follow the facebook page of Canadian Art Magazine for a month and you might find yourself asking what happened to the art?

However, Bette Saunders did inspire one thing for me, a desire to visit the steel cage in Marshalltown and experience for myself if MacKay - Lyons' work conveyed anything of the sustaining spirit of Maud, and whether it levered a sense of the difficult and tragic circumstances that comprised the lives of Maud and Everett. The cage is a replacement to the original dwelling that was moved to the AGNS with the financial assistance of Scotia Bank. But what about the spirit of Maud?

 Frankly, it left me unmoved as does a lot of modernist architecture and memorials do. Steel doesn't absorb sound, it deflects it. There is no respite in this cage from the monologue of steel. Traffic predominates over the sounds of robins chirping in the background. One doesn't sense Maud or Everett - only the tenets of an art movement that ran concurrent to their own anti-modernist lives.

 A house is a living narrative. Wood and plaster absorb the sounds of people, animals, the fog and moisture of a maritime climate; and so speak to the history of the occupants that wear that climate like a suit of skin, the way a stream or river whispers it's own previously undisclosed discourse of the place it cuts though for the individual willing to relinquish their own language.

Were Maud to come back she might be inclined to redecorate the steel cage, the way she inspirited her own house with the sounds and visuals of the world she experienced outside her own window, and the way she redecorated the AGNS with her particular brand of folk imagery without even knowing it.

[1] Erin Morton, For Folk's Sake, pg. 255
[2] Tourism Finds Memorial a Monstrosity [letter to the editor] Digby Courier, April 1998

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS
 

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