Window Box Gallery
My dirty laundry… by Elaine Stewart
Sept13, 2020 -
Sept13, 2020 -
Window Box Gallery
Gallery 1313,
1313 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON
My dirty laundry, as installation, reflects on two of my
most appalling experiences with the medical industrial pharmaceutical complex. It
is an ambivalent response as the system that rescued me is the same system that
undid me.
The psychiatric drugs that I fought against taking to halt
my post partum depression induced a psychotic break. My resultant suicide attempt,
as a result of this break, left me with one functional limb and a wheelchair. I
continue to consume psychiatric drugs; I have not been able to roll away from
them. They continue to interrupt my thinking and functioning and making
processes.
Elaine Stewart immigrated to Canada from Scotland at
a very early age and has worked with threads and fabrics for much of her life.
Her family history is bounded by textiles. When older, she started at the
Toronto School of Art and began to incorporate textiles, threads, and found
materials into her practise. She focusses on both movement- and mind-structured-by-disability
supports in two- and three-dimensional installations.
Elaine appreciates the textures that textiles provide,
whether it be rags wrapped in wire, muslin ripped, torn and dyed a multitude of
colours, or thick and thin threads; they add an organic, emotional edge to her
work.
She has participated in Present Tense, Inclusive Arts
London, Bridging Forward Accessible Arts Festival, and showed her
work online for The Gynocratic Art Gallery. She also participated in Project
Creative Users at Artscape Youngplace during Nuit Blanche and Community
Creates Change at Wychwood Barns Gallery.
Elaine Lives in Toronto.