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On the phone with Postmedia earlier this week, the 72-year-old artist is taking a rare break from the fall harvesting of fruit and vegetables on her island home, where she has lived a somewhat reclusive life since 2003. She built a studio on the property not long after moving there, but over the years it had mostly been used for storage.
“This sort of life that we have here is something that I’ve always wanted,” Taylor Lindoe says. “It wasn’t that I was running away from my art practice so much as going to something that was close to my heart. But while I left my practice behind, it didn’t take much for the interest to open up that door into my mind again and get my mind thinking about art again and about the pleasure of making it.”
Taylor Lindoe, whose practice includes drawing, sculpture and painting, will not reveal specific details about what she has been creating this past year. Nor will Calgarians get a chance to see new pieces as part of Carroll Taylor Lindoe: Inch, Foot, Yard, Mile, her first solo show in two decades that runs until Oct. 10 at the TrepanierBaer. The works on display are mostly from the 1980s, a wildly productive period for the artist that found her immersed in a number of disciplines. That allowed her an eclectic approach, demonstrating a great sense of “geometry, architecture and abstraction with allusions to figure and landscape,” Trepanier says.
It’s a reminder of the place of prominence the artist held in Calgary’s art scene, which made her sudden disappearance from it nearly two decades ago all the more jarring, he says. Her family roots go back to early pioneers of Alberta and the pioneering western Canadian culture has always been “very much a part of my being,” she says. Her parents were also pioneers of sorts. Her father Luke Lindoe was a prominent ceramic artist, painter, sculptor and businessman. Her mother Vivian Lindoe was also a painter, printmaker and ceramist. The couple became part of a small, tight-knit group of post-war artists practising in Calgary.
