Facts And Artifacts in the Collective Matrix by Valerie LeBlanc cc2004 http://purplefireworks.com/
relating to art and teaching, I guess I must have been apprenticing for teaching from a really young age. In my work, I probably had a mistaken idea about art for myself for quite a long time. I thought, ‘ What you do is you paint, and so on.’ But actually, the teacher in me was so strong that I realized years later, that it had entered into my art practice. It really became evident when I did the landscape project (The Gap) because it was an interactive thing, and then again with the (archiving) project at the Glenbow Museum. (Collectively Speaking) VL: I would like to come back to the landscape project, but first, I would like to talk to you about archiving your mother’s belongings and the Glenbow project. VG: Well, she had a system of organizing that was probably related to some kind of predisposition to orderliness, some kind of perfection. I brought a couple of things to show you. She would decide to collect something and she made a lot of scrapbooks. These are Walt Disney images, these are meditations, and these are religious things that came in the Edmonton Journal. … It was just her sense of ordering things, and if you had looked into her kitchen drawers before she moved into the lodge, there were plastic bags, all neatly folded in the drawers, categorized into small, medium and large. And then there were these, the household hints. (Also clipped from the newspaper) Here are some pictures. (Vera brought a few photo examples along.) VL: These are some of the pictures that you took, and you mentioned cataloguing them before the Glenbow approached you. So why was it that you had started to photograph these objects of your Mother’s? VG: I did it on a whim, to feel better, nothing else. My Mother was upset at having to give up her home. She was almost 91 years old, and she had never had anyone help her with anything ever before. Then she suddenly had to give up her home, pack everything, and go into the lodge. It was hard on both of us. I was getting very tired. My spirits were going down, from sheer fatigue. VL: So this is a living archive of your Mother’s belongings. VG: Oh yes, she is still living. It started box by box. I had just got my house cleared out after moving a couple of times and next thing I knew, it was full of her boxes. VL: You know the way you have done this, it almost looks as if it is a catalogue of gifts; those ones that you can order something by number. VG: I put the numbers on them, just on impulse. I wish that I had been a little more careful with it at the time. Here is one with the final archive number in the lower left corner; I put her initials in there. (CPG - Carolyn P. Gartley ) We wrote some of them by hand. VL: You did magnets, with some of them as part of the exhibition. I'll back up a bit, you mentioned that you had started to photograph and to catalogue her belongings and then the Glenbow approached you to do this show, but can you tell me more about why you had decided to catalogue her belongings?
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