Jane Whitten didn’t think she’d be accepted when she applied to have her work included in the Canada Council for the Arts’ Art Bank.
“I knew there was a Canadian art bank, but I just thought it was much loftier, that it was something out of my reach,” the Summerside-area artist said. “And they don’t do a call-out very often.”
But she put together a proposal anyway after seeing a post in the summer of 2022 about the bank’s 50th anniversary collection.
“For most artists, it’s a dream,” Whitten said. “You think, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be nice to have a piece in a permanent collection?'”
A longtime basket-weaver, she wanted to submit a piece that combined her talents with something that made an impact.
“I play with textiles and using traditional techniques in nontraditional ways, usually with unconventional materials,” said the Australian-born artist. “All of my work really relates to environmental issues and the whole concern about climate change and the climate crisis.”
‘Consumed’ is a piece comprised of 12 baskets, woven with plastic wrappings that piled up each month at artist Jane Whitten’s home. (Submitted by Jane Whitten)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Whitten began thinking about how much plastic she was consuming. From frozen vegetable bags to the wrapping on new products she was buying, all of it was going into the recycling bin.
Until she decided to make something of it.
A second life
“I was playing with a new technique for basket making, where I would go coiling. It’s a very traditional, very ancient technique,” Whitten said.
When the new year started in 2022, she decided to get more methodical about it. She wove every piece of plastic that came into her household into a basket, and kept a journal about it.
“I was certainly collecting more plastic and wrapping it in my household, so thought it would be interesting to see what happens from month to month.”
The baskets are each 10.5 centimetres in diameter and vary in height based on how much plastic Whitten used that month. (Submitted by Jane Whitten)
By the end of the year, Whitten had 12 baskets of varying heights, one for each month. Each was 10.5 centimetres in diameter, and between 21 and 38 centimetres tall.
“That ends up being a bit like a bar graph, so you’d be able to compare what I was discarding from one month to the next,” she said.
It was late December when Whitten got the call that the council wanted to buy her basket series — for $8,500. She’s still pinching herself.
“It was not the response I was expecting,” the artist said. “It was overwhelming when that message came through.”
‘It’s giving me more confidence’
Beginning in April, the collection is available for galleries and museums across Canada to rent from the Canada Council.
Whitten hopes that she’ll be able to see her works on display one day, but for now she’s just thrilled to have been recognized.
“It’s giving me more confidence to try some other things,” she said. “To keep going and say, ‘Yeah look, you can do this, you are all right.'”
It’s plastic. It’s going to be there forever. We’ll never get rid of it.— Jane Whitten
Being the only P.E.I.-based artist on the list is also a shock for Whitten. There were more than 1,700 submissions, and just 72 artworks were selected — the first time new work has been added to the Art Bank since 2011.
And because of the nature of the piece, it really is being permanently added to the collection.
“It’s plastic,” she said. “It’s going to be there forever. We’ll never get rid of it.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
