For months, artist Lindsay Alcock has been researching, foraging and experimenting as she wraps up work on her upcoming exhibit Bricolage: The Art of Home Remedies in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Her work features paintings about folk remedies that were once prevalent in this province. The paintings will also be made of the very materials Alcock is depicting —� dandelions, cod and birch bark.
“I am taking a collection of home remedies and I’m going to be using ingredients from those home remedies to create pigments and inks or dyes and I’m going to create visual art,” said Alcock, who works under the name Old Trout Studio.
She explained each piece will either represent an illness that was treated or the remedy itself. In preparation, she did extensive research, taking remedies from folklore literature at the folklore and language archive at Memorial and the work of Dr. John Crellin, a retired professor at Memorial University’s Faculty of Medicine who has written on the subject.
One of the remedies she decided to showcase was birch trees. Birch bark was historically used to cover frostbite and burns.
“So to paint birch trees I tapped some birch trees on my parents property in Cupids and I had made pigment from soot from a campfire and sandstone that I picked up in Lewisporte,” she said.
She also collected dandelions — which were used to treat constipation and to make medicinal wine — and turned them into a botanical print.
Cod wasn’t just for eating either, Alcock explained. A small bone in the cod’s head could be charred on a pan, turned into powder and drunk to treat kidney and bladder issues, she said.
“So I am actually charing cod bones and cod skin at different levels so that I’ll have different values hopefully of the ink that I make and I’m going to paint a cod out of cod,” Alcock said.
As a result, she said there was a lot of experimenting to see what materials would work.
DIY dyes
The exhibit is part of her sabbatical project. She’s the interim associate dean at Memorial University Libraries, with experience working as a medical librarian.
“One person described me as a librarian by day, artist every other second,” she said with a laugh.
When it comes to making art, many people go to their local craft store to pick out supplies, but Alcock heads outdoors and forages for raw materials that she then turns into botanical inks and dyes she can paint with.
It meant she had to plan her art pieces months in advance.
“I spent most of the fall and the winter sort of researching and deciding what I was going to be doing and learning more about the remedies and the stories behind them,” she said.
“I knew spring and summer was going to be the big time because that’s when everything grows. So I didn’t really even have a pallet until the spring started.”
Her sabbatical ends Aug. 1, leaving her with three weeks to finish off the collection. The plan is to have Bricolage open to the public this fall at the Queen Elizabeth II Library’s First Space gallery.
For Alcock, it made sense for people to rely on materials around them for folk treatments. In fact, she said, people still use these old recipes — like collecting spruce tips to make tea.
“To me, this exhibit is not so much about the home remedies as it is about, at its core, celebrating the beauty of nature and our environment and how we can appreciate it in a different way,” she said.
“I hope that people will see the art behind it [and] will see the time that went into it.”
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