sophia bartholomew – September 2024

sophia bartholomew is a queer person and interdisciplinary artist, descended from Norwegian immigrants on Treaty 3 territory in rural Northwestern Ontario, and English and Irish settlers in and around so-called Toronto. Working outwards from the ruins and runes of their own cultural inheritance, their practice spans drawing, writing, sculpture- and installation-making, video, collaboration, and small, daily negotiations with found materials and household waste. Their work borrows its poetics from rural knowledge systems, including craft patterns and junk piles, folk stories and sagas, improvised adaptations and decisions of necessity. By engaging processes of transference and intra-action, their projects consider experiences of loss, physical fragility, interconnection and impermanence, while upholding queer practices of fluidity, adaptability, transformation, hope, and love. Recent group exhibitions include grass taps at the plumb, Loose Parts at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, All Flourishing Is Mutual with Images Festival, and this dream pays for its space in my heart at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery. sophia received their BFA from UBC in 2012 and their MFA from the University of Guelph in 2022. In 2023 they participated in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute. 


https://sophiabartholomew.com/

September 2 2024

sophia’s reflection scattered across dusty panes of glass and piece of mirror left leaning against a red brick wall. A brown cardboard tube intersects the image from the left side. Industrial bay doors are visible behind sophia.

Hi, I’m sophia (they/them). I’m a queer, non-binary person and an interdisciplinary artist. I am Norwegian on my mother’s side of the family, and I’m descended from English and Irish settlers on my father’s side. Since 2020, I’ve lived on the Between the Lakes Treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, in Guelph, ON, the ancestral home of the Chonnonton, the Anishinaabe, and the Haudenosaunee peoples, also bound to the Dish with One Spoon wampum, which extends across the Great Lakes region.

Working outwards from the ruins and runes of my own cultural inheritance, my practice spans drawing, writing, sculpture- and installation-making, video, collaboration, and small, daily negotiations with found materials and household waste.

I’m honoured and excited to be doing the Hammock Residency this year. During my BFA at UBC (2007–2012), my friends and I looked to Hammock Residency as an alternative model for what art practice could look like, and we were deeply inspired by Heidi’s generous, playful, transdisciplinary, and community-minded vision for a different, more inclusive art world. After interviewing Heidi for a magazine article in 2016, the two of us stayed in touch, and they eventually reached out when they were ready to relaunch Hammock in 2020, having paused the project for several years. Since then, I’ve been a member of the Hammock Residency collective, doing grant writing and providing other administrative support. Participating as an artist-in-residence this year is an opportunity for me to better understand the residency program, as well as a chance for me to lean on Hammock to help me stay grounded as I navigate a time of intense loss and grief.

September 3 2024

  • sophia sitting sideways on the passenger seat of a white cargo van, wearing leopard print pants and a pink shirt. The side door of the van is open, revealing a backpack and other bags.
  • sophia loading a large roll of brown paper into the back of a white cargo van. Inside the back of the van there are other rolls of paper and piles of sticks. sophia is wearing a plaid flannel shirt and brown puffer vest.
  • sophia standing in a white gallery space with paintings behind, reading a list of works. They are wearing a bright green puffer jacket, black toque and glasses.
  • sophia sitting at a table, leaning over a plate and mug with a fork in their hand, wearing a blue denim button-up, glasses and a ball cap.
  • Sideview of sophia speaking while gesturing with their hands, outdoors, surrounded by people.
  • view of sophia from behind, facing the water and trees, their left elbow leaning on Richard’s right knee.
  • sophia smiling, sitting outdoors, holding up a stuffed animal they’re making.

Through my year-long Hammock residency, I am holding open space for a new body of work to emerge as I process the death of my partner. I’ve been sitting deep in the incoherence of my grief all year, seeking out something formless and evasive, watching as this new work shifts things around and slowly starts to make shapes.

Starting in the fall of 2022, my partner – Richard Laviolette @richard.laviolette – began to experience the intense physical, cognitive and emotional symptoms of Huntington’s Disease, and through the next eleven months, his health declined rapidly, compounded by other complex health issues. He chose to receive MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) last September, and since that time I’ve been processing my own grief, while also holding space for other peoples’ love and grief, and trying to help carry forward Richard’s creative work as best I can, including his record All Wild Things Are Shy, the last album he recorded before he died.

These are some pictures Richard took of me on his phone, through 2022 and 2023.

September 4 2024

Richard’s gridded calendar, marked up with pen and yellow highlighter. There are eight squares in every row instead of seven, so one column of squares has been scratched out. It is taped to a white wall with blue painter’s tape.

When I was mapping out this month of Instagram posts, I drew out a rough, gridded calendar by hand, and without thinking I taped it up on my bedroom wall. Later I realized that last August, in the last month of Richard’s life, he’d made a similar, hand-drawn calendar, and taped it up on the wall in almost exactly the same place. In the weeks after Richard’s passing, I shot a roll of film in our shared apartment, documenting some of the things he’d left behind, including this calendar. I also took photos of his clothes and cigarettes and ostomy supplies left behind in the bedroom closet.

The format of the gregorian calendar, this gridded structure laid out over time, it helps me move through the days and not forget too many things, but I also feel its fragility and its fiction. I feel how it’s an invented structure that contains and frames time, but that the reality of time both precedes and exceeds it. For me time – my position within time – feels slippery and loose.

Richard’s t-shirts and button-up shirts hung on colourful hangers on a wooden curtain rod. boxes of ostomy supplies are piled on the shelf above the curtain rod, inside a white melamine closet.
Close up of Richard’s shirts.

In the last few years, as I’ve rummaged around in my family’s histories, digging further and further back, I arrived in the song and story world of viking age culture in Norway. In this worldview, past–present–future (urth–verthandi–skuld) stand shoulder to shoulder, weaving the fates of mortal beings in tandem — laying out a picture of time that is interwoven and non-linear.

September 5 2024

nk drawing of Richard’s neck, displaying a temporary tattoo that reads “All Wild Things Are Shy”. The drawing rests on the back of a large sketchbook, lying on the floor.
Ink drawing of lyrics and song credits
Ink drawing for the labels on the vinyl.

Richard died one year ago today, and All Wild Things Are Shy – the album he recorded in the last eight months of his life – is being released today by You’ve Changed Records @youvechangedrecords

Early on, Richard had asked if I would do the artwork for this record. He always wanted to help me with my art stuff and he asked me to help him with his. At that point, early in 2022, it really didn’t seem like it would be his last record, and we certainly didn’t know that he wouldn’t be around long enough to see it released.

We talked about MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) that fall, as Richard grappled with the fact that the Huntington’s Disease symptoms really had started. Based on how things were at the time, he thought he would want to receive MAID in four to five years. By the springtime, March or April, things were getting a lot harder, and he thought he maybe only had one or two years left. By the end of May he was talking about receiving MAID as early as the fall or the winter, and by mid-July things had gotten so bad he was ready to leave. He stuck around through August to visit with friends and family, to say his goodbyes, and to wrap up the record as best he could, making all the final decisions about the mixes.

In those last few weeks, even when things had become such a struggle, Richard chose to die in the way that he had lived — in community — and after weeks of gathering together with family and friends, on September 5, a small group of us sat with Richard, laughing at his last jokes and singing for him as he crossed over.

I did the album artwork for the record, including this ink drawing of a hand drawn temporary tattoo. I also wrote out all of the lyrics and liner notes and song titles and credits, using a small brush to draw them out with india ink.

September 6 2024

Inverted ink drawing that says: “Richard Laviolette, All Wild Things Are Shy, Montreal – August 1, Sackville – August 3, Toronto – September 6, Guelph – September 15, Owen Sound – October 10”

Together with Richard’s band and his record label, I’ve been working to put together a small run of album release shows for All Wild Things Are Shy @richard.laviolette @youvechangedrecords⁠
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The third of five shows is happening tonight, September 6, at The Tranzac in Toronto. The band will be performing the twelve songs from Richard’s last record, with the support of local guest vocalists José Contreras (By Divine Right), Cormac Culkeen (Joyful Joyful), Peter Demakos (Pete Moss), Geordi Gordon, Abigail Lapell, Terra Lightfoot, Tamara Lindeman (The Weather Station), and Jiaqing Wilson Yang⁠ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️⁠

Doors are at 7:30, music starts at 8:00, with an opening set by Abigail Lapell. The last show Richard played was last spring, when he opened for Abigail Lapell at the babyg in Toronto @thebabygtoronto ⁠
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Keeping with the style of the album artwork, I made ink drawings for all of the information on the show posters as well⁠

Photograph of the original ink drawings, made on pages torn out of a sketchbook. The torn our pages are lying on top of the sketchbook, on top of a pile of other notebooks, on a table with a patterned tablecloth. ⁠

September 7 2024

A hand holding a sealed copy of the vinyl 2xLP of All Wild Things Are Shy, with a reproduction of an ink drawing on the front cover. Behind the record is a light-yellow limestone wall.

It’s so cool to see these drawings reproduced on the 2xLP and CD copies of All Wild Things Are Shy. Like all the zines and pamphlets and small artist multiples I’ve made in the past, these drawings are now objects with a life of their own, and they will move through the world in unknowable, unmappable ways, sometimes surfacing unexpectedly. ⁠
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Richard and I had picked out this image last summer, but in the months after he died, I struggled to actually do the drawing. It wasn’t that it was technically difficult, it just demanded a lot of mental and emotional space, and I struggled to find the space. ⁠

Seeing Richard’s album through has been a beautiful process, and at times it has been extremely hard. It has felt like an extended collaboration with Richard, a way for us to stay in conversation with each other. It’s also opened up an extended conversation with Richard’s friend Steve Lambke, from You’ve Changed Records, with Scott Merritt and Rich Burnett, who worked closely with Richard, in recording and mixing the album, and with Richard’s band, Jessy Bell Smith, Rich Burnett, Ally Corbett, Jordan Howard, Matthew Reeves, and Dave Snider, as we worked together to imagine what the album release could look like in Richard’s absence. ⁠

So far, each of the album release shows has felt like a journey ~~ an interdimensional portal ~~ gathering together to walk the path of deep love and deep loss laid out in each of the songs.⁠
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It’s hard for me to fathom the strangeness of this past year. It shimmers around me: incoherent, amorphous. 

A hand holding a sealed hardcopy of the vinyl 2xLP of All Wild Things Are Shy, with handwritten liner notes on the back cover. Behind the record is a yellowish limestone wall. ⁠

September 8 2024

  • Pairs of 35mm film photos, one of Richard, and one of sophia, stacked one over top of the other on a white background: 1. Both wearing a blue shirt, standing in front windows on a beige building. sophia is blinking, Richard is wearing a black hoodie and smiling.
  • Pairs of 35mm film photos, one of Richard, and one of sophia, stacked one over top of the other on a white background: 2. Both are wearing winter jackets. Richard is standing on a deck with a string of lights above him, sophia is standing in front of a door, blinking and out of focus.
  • Both are wearing winter jackets, standing on the street. Richard is blinking, wearing a black hat, sophia is smiling wearing a black toque.
  • Both are wearing black coats, standing in a parking lot. Richard is smiling and sophia is blinking.

Richard and I took these photos of each other, intermittently and at odd intervals, through the last year of his life. One of us would take a photo and then we would hand the camera off to the other person, pausing to focus the lens. Many of these photos are awkward and out of focus and that’s what I love about them. In some of the photos we’re content or happy, in others upset or preoccupied, in still others ambiguous, unreadable. They stitch through the many interstitial, uneventful moments in our shared life, documenting the day-to-day act of witnessing each other.

When we started taking these photos we didn’t know that it would be Richard’s last year. That only became clear in our last four months together. At the time it seemed like this project would stretch out over several years, woven into our every day.

September 9 2024

  • Both are wearing a black t-shirt, sitting indoors. Richard is blinking, with his eyebrows raised, wearing a yellow beaded necklace. sophia is sitting in front of a wooden sideboard with two flamingo ornaments on it and a rubber plant
  • Taken out on the sidewalk on a residential street, with green lawns and trees, and houses visible in the background.
  • Both are out of focus, standing in a parking lot on a street downtown. Richard is sitting, smoking. sophia is wearing a black hoodie with the hood up. They are out of focus but you can read the words on the signs across the street: “groceries” and “shop”.
  • Standing on a balcony in springtime, surrounded by green trees, smiling at each other. Richard is out of focus.

I’ve been interested in how photographs are a document not only of what is in front of the camera, but also of what and who is behind the camera. I love that they can be a window into someone else’s way of seeing. I’ve also been interested in accidental photographs, or out-of-focus photographs, awkward or unflattering photographs – photographs which are more clearly a document of an embodied moment in time.

Richard and I shot these pairs of photos on my mom’s old Minolta, which I borrowed from her in high school and never gave back. We took these pictures of each other irregularly, whenever we remembered to. Because the camera doesn’t have a flash, they had to be taken when there was sufficient daylight.

All of the rolls of film sat on a shelf in the door of our fridge. I didn’t get any of them processed until late November last year, so Richard never saw them. After picking up the film, I sat on the train, heading home, and I sifted through all of these prints for the first time and I cried and I cried.

September 10 2024

sophia is staring right at the camera, visibly distressed, with a parked car, a limestone building, and a stand of bright yellow goldenrod visible in the background.
Richard is standing in front of goldenrod growing beside a concrete barrier, holding a drink bottle in one hand and raising the other hand, blinking and looking away.

These first two photos were taken on September 5, in the early afternoon before Richard received MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying). It was hot out so we’d bought lemonade, which is what Richard’s holding in his right hand.

I took the other three photos over the course of the past year, returning to the place where he was standing on that last day and taking a picture of his absence.

The place where Richard was standing, but without him there, in wintertime with snow on the ground.
The place where Richard was standing, but without him there, in early spring with the first green grass coming up, and moisture visible in the cracks of the concrete.
The place where Richard was standing, but without him there, in early summer with leaves on the trees and the milkweed and goldenrod grown in at about knee-height.

September 11 2024

Klara is wearing a pink sweater and sitting on a green velvet armchair. sophia is kneeling, wearing a red and black patterned sweater and black overalls.

Eight years ago, my mom asked if I could go live with my mormor – my mother’s mother – in the house that she and my grandfather had built in rural Northwestern Ontario, just outside of Dryden. I lived with my mormor – Klara – on and off for the next couple of years, staying for a few months at a time.

She resisted having her photo taken, in the same way she resisted a lot of other things at the end of her life – eating, leaving the house, going for a drive, going to town, having a friend over. Her heart had grown tired. She’d lived to be old enough that she’d lost not only her life partner, but most of her friends, and nearly all of her neighbours and acquaintances too.

Somehow I convinced her to take a small handful of photos in the same way Richard and I would later do. At the time, I thought of them as reciprocal portraits. We shot these photos on a point-and-shoot that I found in a drawer in her kitchen.

One thing I love, looking at them now, is how in behind us you get these glimpses of how she had her home. In those last few years, things were less particular and less ordered than they had been, the stream of visitors had steadily slowed, but she always managed to make things nice, even when they never had very much. The house always felt warm and people always felt welcome, family and friends and strangers alike. After she died it was like the glue had all gone. As we sat around and sifted through all of the framed photos and knicknacks, the pots and the pans and the plates, the cutlery, blankets, tablecloths, furniture – none of it made sense together anymore.

Klara is sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a bright red shawl and blinking. sophia is sitting at the kitchen table in front of the fridge.

September 12 2024

In these years when I lived together with my mormor, I was experiencing a lot of change and transition in my life, just as she was experiencing change and transition in hers. I found myself at a crossroads in my art practice, and spending this time with her helped me to ground and reorient my work. ⁠
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Every time I went away and came back, I could feel how I had to adjust my internal rhythm to match hers. We sat and talked and played cards and held hands. We watched all the episodes of Golden Girls and Downton Abbey that she had on DVD. We listened to the radio. I looked through all her albums and shoeboxes full of photos. I cooked and cleaned and walked around the property and cut down the rhubarb and shovelled snow. We parked beside the frozen lake, looking out at all the ice fishing huts and watching the cars driving over the ice road. We got ice cream in the summertime and she got her hair done. We finally managed to get her accessible parking permit from the Service Ontario office, and then somehow we lost it. ⁠

A pair of 35mm film photos, one of Klara’s shadow and one of sophia’s shadow, stacked one over top of the other on a white background.⁠

I had always loved the way things were at my mormor’s house and at my aunt and uncle’s house. The weather and the weathering, the scrap piles and junk piles out on the property, all of the creative, provisional fixes to material problems, the sounds of the wind and the sounds of the train, the trees. My grandparents had run a construction company out of their home for close to forty years, so many things had been patched together with materials left over from other jobs.⁠

This pair of photos are of my shadow and my mormor’s shadow – a photo I took one summer when I was there, out blueberry picking on a nearby clearcut, and a photo my mormor had taken, probably ten or fifteen years before, when she was travelling in Manitoba with her best friend, Mary. ⁠

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew, Klara Tuft @bartholomew.sophia

September 13 2024

A photo of Richard and sophia’s shadows standing side by side. Their shadows are cast on large rocks, half-submerged in water, along the shore of a blue-green glacial river.

When we first got to know each other, Richard and I realized that we’d both nearly died in our late teens – he from ulceric colitis and me in a hiking accident. It was so unusual to understand and to be understood in this way. My near death experience was almost always just a story that I would eventually tell people. It was almost never something that they could relate to.

As we talked, we found the experience had shaped us in some similar ways, driving us through our twenties with a certain intensity and fervour, at times, impatience. It also coloured the work that we’d made as artists — our awareness of the fragility of our small, human bodies — a heightened sense of entropy and decay. Coming so close to death had shaped the words and the materials that we each chose to use, and it informed the way that we chose to live.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

September 14 2024

I love this drawing Richard made for the cover of his 2009 album “Aging Recycling Plant” which maps out his scars and his ostomy pouch. In my first year at art school I made so many similar drawings, laying bare my body and my scars. I’ve lost or destroyed all those drawings in the many years since, so I decided to make a new one in the style of Richard’s drawing – wanting to meet him in his humour and vulnerability.

Two drawings, one of Richard and one of sophia, highlighting the prominent scars on their bodies The first drawing is a printout, copied from Richard’s album artwork. The second drawing has been made in a sketchbook.

Our brushes with death had been wildly different, but they left very similar scars on our bodies. Richard and I shared a long scar down the front of our torsos, and we both had four-inch scars stretching over one side of our hips – Richard’s on his right side, and mine on my left. I’ve also got one below each armpit, where they put tubes in my lungs, and one underneath my chin, where a rock went through my face.

When we first started dating I told Richard that when I turned thirty I’d realized that in some deep, unconscious way I hadn’t expected to live. Up until that point, middle age and old age had felt impossible, abstract. When I turned thirty I suddenly had to adjust the picture I had of my life, the future.

Soon I found out that by the time Richard turned thirty, he’d had several more major surgeries, including a hip replacement, and he’d taken a blood test and found out that he had the gene for Huntington’s Disease. He knew that the symptoms would probably start at some point in his forties, with few options for treatment and no cure.

Because of what I’d been through, this didn’t scare me in the way that it might’ve. I knew that nothing in life was certain, and in my thinking, even a looming, terminal, degenerative illness was no guarantee. In the end, none of us know how we’re going to die, though Richard carried the heavy weight of having a clearer picture than most.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

Two drawings, one of Richard and one of sophia, highlighting the prominent scars on their bodies The first drawing is a printout, copied from Richard’s album artwork. The second drawing has been made in a sketchbook.

September 15 2024

Two heavily damaged canvases.

On September 15, 2006 I fell fifteen metres off a cliff and almost died. I was nineteen years old and I was out on the side of a mountain by myself, overnight. I was unlucky to have fallen but I was lucky to have lived and lucky to have been rescued the following day.

Through my early twenties, in order to live my life I had to build a story for myself about what had happened. I went to therapy on and off, processing the trauma of my accident and learning to identify and cope with the symptoms of PTSD, adrenal fatigue, and traumatic brain injury.

During my MFA (2020–22) I was compelled to crack open this story and reconsider it through the lens of the old norse sagas I was reading, and here’s what I wrote:

// Half my blood was lost, leaked out on the side of the mountain, and in exchange the mountain left parts of itself inside me: small fragments of moss and stone. Over the course of hours and days, many peoples’ hands crossed the skin threshold of my body: cutting and cleaning and sewing and scanning, picking their way through the rocks and other debris. Their machines whirred, humming and beeping, pulsing. They rolled my body across the floor.

For many days my thought-self (hugr) hung suspended, unbounded, while my body-self (hamr) lay swollen full of water, machine-breathing, peeing through a tube and shitting into a pan. As time passed my hugr and hamr were re-joined. My bones grew back together, but different. Now when I go walking out in the fresh air, under the sky, my face leaks tears. When I’m sleeping, spit drips along healed fissures. Half my blood was replaced.

In pre-Christian norse cosmology hugr and hamr, the thought-self and the body-self, are two of the four parts of the self. The remaining two parts are fylgja and hamingja, a person’s attendant spirit and a person’s luck. All four are viewed as intrinsic parts of a fluid and shifting self. //

Pictured is a work I made in 2011, weighting two 6’ canvases to match my body weight and throwing them fifteen metres off a cliff in the Seymour Demonstration Forest.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew

September 16 2024

I also included this more fact-based account of my accident in my MFA thesis, taking on the voice of a news report:

The photos show a slope covered in large rocks, and a sheer, mossy rock face, with large rocks at the bottom.

// September 16, 2006: Early this morning a 19-year-old Canadian citizen was reported missing on Vesterås mountain, in Geiranger, Norway. Local police worked with a group of volunteers to search the area on foot, while an emergency call was made to SAR and police service helicopters, nationally. Police helicopter LN-OCP was the first to arrive. They located the missing person, unconscious and in critical condition, at the bottom of a cliff near Storsæter. The LN-OCP helicopter was unable to land, but left one officer in place to assess the young person’s condition. An Mk.43B Sea King helicopter, operated by the Royal Norwegian Air Force search-and-rescue squadron, arrived shortly afterwards and has since transported the 19-year-old to the Ålesund hospital where they are undergoing emergency surgery. They are being treated for hypothermia, brain injury, major blood-loss, punctured and collapsed lungs, shattered bones and other internal injuries, and they remain in critical condition.

The victim had notified friends and coworkers that they were leaving to go hiking on Vesterås mountain yesterday morning, and the alarm was sounded when they failed to report to work early today. Their injuries are consistent with having slipped, slid and fallen down a steep section of mountain. Local police officer Johan Arnt Overøye estimates they fell fifteen meters from the nearest section of trail. Overøye also indicated that he has seen many hiking accidents in these mountains, and not one of the missing persons has ever been found alive.

Although the victim is a Canadian national whose first language is English, LN-OCP’s attending officer noted that when they first regained consciousness, they spoke to him in Norwegian, in the local Møre og Romsdal dialect. //

Pictured are photos taken by my mom’s cousin at the fall site, used as figures in my paper.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew

September 17 2024

  • Photos of the artwork described above lying on a scuffed hardwood floor: 1. with the gesso-ed side facing up
  • Photos of the artwork described above lying on a scuffed hardwood floor with the gesso-ed side facing down, and the cracks more clearly articulated,
  • Photos of the artwork described above lying on a scuffed hardwood floor close-up of the gesso-ed side, and,
  • Photos of the artwork described above lying on a scuffed hardwood floor - close-up of the side without gesso.
  • Photos of the artwork described above lying on a scuffed hardwood floor

I made this work a few years ago. A studio neighbour of mine in Vancouver knew that I was working with scrap wood and scrap paper, so they’d given me this large piece of cardstock. Eventually I made a drawing on the paper with watercolour pencils, and then I crumpled it up and submerged it in a bucket of water. The paper fell apart almost immediately, tearing along the deepest creases I’d made. I patiently pulled the paper out of the bucket, piece by piece, and layed the pieces out to dry.

Crumpling the paper and then wetting it had moved it towards softness, but as it dried, it became more rigid, more brittle. I knew that the paper was made from wood fibre, so I applied a wood polish to it that I’d made from beeswax and coconut oil, and the paper grew soft again. I slowly puzzled the pieces back together, using staples to join every seam, and I painted over the residual drawing with gesso.

Richard @richard.laviolette said something to me once, in passing, when we were talking about my work. Something about how I was looking for beauty in broken things, and that in some core way that was what my work was about. I wish I could remember what he’d said, exactly. Something in that direction.

I was talking to Sarah Mangle @sarahmangle about this recently, and when I asked if she would reflect on this quality in my work, she said:

/ / I think your work is really interesting because it’s like process and end-point and beginning-point are all equally important. I feel like process, trace, decay, disintegration – all of these things are more important than your end product, and… you’ve sustained time in this way, you’ve sustained the quiet parts of something eroding or falling away. / /

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

September 18 2024

  • A drawing in a sketchbook, showing the DIY quilting frame Richard’s grandma taught him to use.
  • Richard’s quilts.
  • Richard’s quilts.
  • Richard’s quilts.
  • Richard’s quilts.
  • A hand holding a black and white photocopied zine, titled MY GRANDMA’S MORE PUNK.

A couple years ago, I came home with a bunch of c-clamps and Richard made me this drawing, explaining the DIY quilting rig his Grandma Pat taught him to use when she taught him how to quilt. I guess quilting frames typically go for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars, but Richard’s grandma showed him how to make a large, adjustable frame out of 2x2s and c-clamps. The way he told it, Richard had spent some time living with her in his late-twenties, before his first hip surgery, learning how to quilt. He later wrote the song “My Grandma’s More Punk (Than Most Punks I Know)” for her, which opens with:

/ / Money’s never grown on the trees in her yard /
Gets by with what she has and she’s had to work hard /
Waste not, want not and cook your own food /
If you keep your hands busy, then you won’t get the blues / /

Followed by a verse about her quilt making:

/ / Old coats and jackets in brown garbage bags /
Stored in the attic and out of the way /
Ripped up and fed through a sewing machine /
The quota’s a quilt for each loved one in need / /

When Richard talked about making quilts, I got the sense that he loved that you could make something both beautiful and useful with whatever was at hand – rearranging scraps to make something new. Many of his quilts use a patchwork checkerboard pattern, and they’ve been hand tied rather stitched together, the layers fastened together with colourful pieces of yarn.

Pictured is the quilt he made for his ex-partner Sarah Mangle after they broke up, a quilt he left with his sister for safekeeping, and a quilt he made as a wedding gift for his brother. Also pictured is Richard’s 2014 zine about quilting, which has a photo of a narrative quilt of his on the cover.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 1. A drawing in a sketchbook, showing the DIY quilting frame Richard’s grandma taught him to use. 2./3./4. Photos of Richard’s quilts. 5. A close up of one of the quilts, including the backing. 6. A hand holding a black and white photocopied zine, titled MY GRANDMA’S MORE PUNK.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew, Christine Hillier, Sarah Mangle, Matthew Laviolette

September 19 2024

Last summer I made this work “quilt” by sewing patterned security envelopes into a patchwork.

Years before a friend had shown me an old family quilt made from patterned flour or feed sacks, and knowledge of this practice had hovered in my peripheral awareness ever since. Though this was a relatively common practice in rural Canada and the US in the first half of the twentieth century, it doesn’t seem to be very well documented. From what I can gather, companies started printing attractive patterns on their cloth sacks, compelling people to buy more from a particular brand in order to gather more cloth with the desired pattern.

Hanging from a piece of scrap lumber, suspended with wire from the ceiling in a gallery.
  • Hanging in the gallery after dark.
  • Held up by sophia, with only their fingers visible along the top edge of the work.
  • Patchwork squares made from sewing different envelope patterns together, laid out on a table.
Two different envelope patterns being sewn together on a sewing machine.

On some level “quilt” pays homage to this work of saving and salvaging, repairing and remaking. I’d been saving the security envelopes for many years, admiring their varied patterns, and once I finally thought of it, making a link between the patterned envelopes and the patterned flour or feed sacks felt easy and obvious.

I recently re-read an interview with Sarah Lucas, published in Parkett Magazine (vol. 45) in 1995. In the interview she so clearly articulates something about this slow process of things gradually coming together:

/ / The idea and the materials all have to come together in a good relationship… I have half an idea all the time and it might be quite a good half an idea. But half an idea doesn’t make an object. Nor can it be contrived. It must be lived out and the materials must be allowed to live it out. So I’m in an odd relationship of mutual respect with these things. / /

PHOTO: Tyler Matheson, Hazel Eckert, Jackson Klie, sophia bartholomew

September 20 2024

This work “year counter, flesh marker” (2022) is made from layers of hand stitched snapshots and kraft paper, quilted together in places and propped up against the wall with pieces of lumber.

  • Seen from the other side of the room, with sunlight casting shapes across the wall and the floor.
  • Seen from the right side, looking into the layers, with the pieces of lumber criss-crossing.
  • Close up from the right side, with a cat’s paw peeking out from behind panels of wrinkled kraft paper.
  • Close up on the sunlight cast across the floor.

The snapshots are mine and my mormor’s and my mother’s, pictures of snow and sunsets and plants and non-human animals, culled from decades of photos taken in and around the house that my grandparents built on a wooded piece of land covered with spruce and pine trees growing in sandy soil and clay. I’d scanned the snapshots and blown them up, printing them out onto long strips of semi-translucent paper, and sewing them together by hand, imperfectly. The kraft paper panels are a patchwork of brown paper bags and other packing material, smoothed out and sewn together on my sewing machine.

When I was making the work, I knelt down on the floor, passing long, loose stitches through all of the layers, binding them together. The paper was piled casually, like a handful of notes and photos left on a desk or a coffee table.

This title “year counter, flesh marker” comes from a list of kennings for “raven” found in Skaldskaparmal (The Language of Poetry), an early thirteenth century text attributed to Snorri. Within the story world of old norse cosmology, ravens invoke the two ravens perched on Odin’s shoulders, sent out over the world during the day, and returning to their perch at night – one of them named “thought” and the other “memory”.

Kennings are an associative, allusive poetic device used prominently in old norse literature, and in old icelandic, the word ‘kenning’ can also mean ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘teachings’.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

September 21 2024

  • sophia stands to the left of a photo print of birds perched in a snow-covered pine tree. The print is a little bit taller then they are, and is hanging from a long band of pale yellow paper that’s been folded and hole punched and stapled together. sophia is holding up the upper left hand corner of the work. The print is visibly made from four long panels of paper that have been sewn together, and it extends beyond the edge of the wall, its bottom edge draped across the floor.
  • The same photo print seen from a different angle.
  • A close up of the photo print, showing one of the birds perched at the top of the pine tree. Hand stitching is visible where two of the panels join, and the image of the bird is not lined up perfectly.

Before I piled and propped them up, I had tried hanging the sewn snapshots with these paper armatures. I love each of the individual images so much, and I love the way the semi-translucent paper they’re printed on behaves like a fabric, but there’s some other kind of truth that happens when they’re piled and propped up that I ultimately prefer. Maybe it’s that they feel more like the mass and the mess of my own memory – fractured, fragmented, and fragile, at times blocked out – opaque.

PHOTO: Alicia Barbieri, sophia bartholomew @a.rose.barbieri@bartholomew.sophia

September 22 2024

  • Two cats curled up on the living room floor.
  • Skidoo tracks on a frozen lake at sunset.
  • A vase of red roses sitting on my mormor’s kitchen table
  • A sunset reflected on low cloud cover.
  • Four people swimming and standing in a lake.
  • A deer out in the yard, seen through the kitchen window.

These are some scans of the snapshots I used to make “year counter, flesh marker”, which I had collected as part of an earlier, exploratory project – “snow flower sunset lake” – developed during a residency at Platform Centre in Winnipeg, and through mentorship support, first from Sheilah ReStack, and later from Sandra Semchuk and Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed. @sheilah.restack@latifas.herbs@platform_centre

I used the title “snow flower sunset lake” to draw a loose perimeter around the work I did in conversation with my mormor, Klara – living with her and looking at her photographic negatives and prints. In the mix, I discovered many photos taken by my mom, and gradually I let the influence of this time and all these photos leak into my own work, as I took my own photographs.

The project stretched through all the time I spent living with my mormor, cooking and cleaning, watching the seasons pass and keeping her company. My feeling was that Klara and I had always been kindred, not only through kinship, but through some other kind of bond. We would hold hands, and her eyes would grow distant. Things would come to the surface which I have never seen before.

I continued to move through this project after my mormor’s passing in 2019, and that’s when Sandra Semchuk introduced me to Annette Kuhn’s concept of memory work, described in Kuhn’s book “A Journey Through Memory”:

/ / Memory work undercuts assumptions about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, taking it not as ‘truth’ but as evidence of a particular sort: material for interpretation… the task is not to psychoanalyze people but to be helpfully at hand at the birth of new insight and fresh understanding. / /

PHOTO: Klara Tuft, Marian Toft

September 23 2024

  • Two grids straddling a door.
  • One grid nestled between a door and the kitchen counter.
  • Two grids and the edge of a third one that’s been cut off, with bits of painter’s tape on the wall below them.
  • Two grids, one flush with the corner of the room.
  • Printed photographs of flowers and foliage, taped in a repeating grid. There are 16 photographs.

The one summer I spent living with my mormor, I borrowed a few books from the public library and I learned to recognize some of the wild plants that were growing on the property around the house — fireweed, wild strawberry, wild chamomile, plantain, pearly everlasting, wild carrot, cow vetch, yellow crown vetch, asters, goldenrod, and yarrow —

Watching these flowers bloom and fade, I was struck by how quickly they came and went, so much so that the following summer, when I was subletting a place in Montreal, I started photographing the flowers that I found growing in the alleyway behind my apartment building — pink and yellow and orange daylilies, roses, hostas, creeping bellflower, petunias, morning glory, clematis, and burdock —

I photographed these plants every day over several months. Some of the blooms lasted only a few days, others a week or two. Some bloomed a second or third time, others only bloomed once. I loved that the plants inhabited a kind of threshold space, leaking or spilling out from people’s backyard gardens. I took a lot from this daily ritual, slowly bearing witness — watching all the time around the flowers and the flowering happen — watching as the alleyway overgrowth grew more raucous and chaotic —

I shot all the photos on my mom’s old Minolta, and when I got the prints back, I taped them up around my apartment, making them into these poster-size grids.

PHOTO: Mel McMicheal @mermaidboyfriend

September 24 2024

A photo of sophia reflected in a mirror leaning against the floor. On the wall above the mirror there are snapshots taped to the wall with green painter’s tape.

Looking back through my photos, I found just the one photo I took of myself all summer.

Taking plant photos every day, I was watching the passage of time, not just around me, but through me, in me. Makes me think about this thing Sarah Mangle @sarahmangle said about my work in relation time:

/ / It does something different with time, and also something different with… what it means for a material to have a life. I think many art practices, whether they mean to or not, only interact with the shiny and new, or intended version of the material, and I think your work is interested in all of the other time, all of the rest of the life of the material. It’s all there. / /

  • The same flowers and the same fence later in the summer.
  • A photo of pink flowers with a wooden fence in the background.
  • The same flowers and the same fence later in the summer.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

September 25 2024

I was recently asked to think about the ways that writing has been woven into my practice, often walking parallel to other kinds of making. For me, language has always felt tactile and textured, unwieldy, alive — not so very different any other material.

Six years ago, when I was rummaging around in all the thoughts and feelings I’d picked up while living in Dryden, I wrote this text and carved it into a piece of melamine board someone was getting rid of on garbage day:

/ /

A white melamine board with text carved into it leans against a white wall, sitting on a hardwood floor.
A white melamine board with text carved into it leans against a white wall, sitting on a hardwood floor.

that cobble cloud cover, gap teeth grinning, gridded, squares and rectangles they don’t share the same tongues — black pool wiggle water, sentient but slow moving a centuries-long consciousness making stones out of sand — concrete mixer, backyard grater crater, grinding soft curvatures moving above the sky — spruce and pine roots hanging from the engine’s noises, inertia bottoms blooming, bellows — suns rise, sunsets — atmosphere evaporation, blocks built of banter-canter, can’t tell you not to, never could tell you anything

/ /

PHOTO: Mel McMicheal @mermaidboyfriend

September 26 2024

I’ve wanted to explore video as a place where some of my writing could live, either as subtitles or audio — text read aloud. Last spring Richard and I shot this video together — “short dreams” — working loosely from a shot list I’d drafted 💅🏼✨

Here’s some of the text that appears as subtitles in the video:

/ /

I can’t live inside of this fear anymore. Where it grows I pull it out. Some days the soil is soft, so it moves easily. Other days the roots stay, stubbornly snapped off, baked into the hard walls of the dry ground.

Time moves through me with its frantic rhythm. I hear the sound of footsteps in my body, falling left, right.

/ /

I’ve left a link to the full video in the @hammockresidency bio.

VIDEO DESCRIPTION: Close up of sophia’s hands painting Richard’s toenails, sitting at the edge of the river. Close up of Richard and sophia’s feet side by side, beside the river. Close up of the scar on sophia’s stomach and their belly button. Richard piles dandelions on their stomach, in their bellybutton and over their scar. sophia pulls their sweatshirt down over the dandelions on their stomach and stands up. Close up of the dandelion pollen left on their black sweatshirt.

VIDEO: sophia bartholomew, Richard Laviolette @bartholomew.sophia@richard.laviolette

September 27 2024

  • A scan of sans serif text that has been cut up and pasted back together, arranged to read, "between the cracks the meat of me grows from the Greek root / the word “poetry” / living cells housed inside a mineralized organic matrix. / What happens if your body dies? / the blue cotton / the speed of rocks eroding / the rest of the world recedes into a haze."
  • A scan of sans serif text that has been cut up and pasted back together, rearranged. It says "the plates and the bowls and the wooden spoons / the sink / the purple saucepan, the cutlery / the colander the water / the pile the coffee / the future / the rest / the plants / the noodles / the bottom of the pot / the sink water / the smell of it / the lavender scented dish soap / the apartment".
  • A scan of sans serif text that has been cut up and pasted back together, rearranged to read, "The word “years” / the skin on them looks older, older than you were / it hurts to think about it / Since you died / the sun and the street lights / day after day after day / I take in trace amounts of the dust you left behind. / The hair and the steady rhythm of sleeping.."
  • A scan of sans serif text that has been cut up and pasted back together, rearranged to read, "mostly I don’t cry. I post pictures / shiny and legible, unreal. / I sink down inside the unstoried noise of the hole, it’s total incoherence. / the idea of the hole. / hard and smooth and portable. / the heat and the weight / the whole hurt / melting or crushing me / To live I carry it outwardly in a story.".
  • A scan of sans serif text that has been cut up and pasted back together, rearranged. It says "a stone block, a brick on the front of my forehead. / it swells up in my joints / I feel like the rotten wooden / bones / My thighs remember / My hands remember / grief pools in different places."
  • A scan of sans serif text that has been cut up and pasted back together, rearranged to read, "The soil when I surface. The birds / Starlings, robins, chickadees, house wrens / The line between too much and not enough / more of an expanse a territory / It rains and it rains / and sweating becomes mulberries staining the sidewalk."

These texts are part of a work I’ve made for the group exhibition “This dream pays for it’s space in my heart” which opens at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery @kwartgallery next weekend, Saturday, October 5

“This dream pays for it’s space in my heart” includes work by Darby Minott Bradford, Derya Akay, Eve Tagny, and myself, curated by ellipses collective 
(greta hamilton and Katherine Jemima Hamilton) @newportmanteau @daisymozzy @eve.t_eve.t

between the cracks the meat of me grows from the Greek root / the word “poetry” / living cells housed inside a mineralized organic matrix. / What happens if your body dies? / the blue cotton / the speed of rocks eroding / the rest of the world recedes into a haze

the plates and the bowls and the wooden spoons / the sink / the purple saucepan, the cutlery / the colander the water / the pile the coffee / the future / the rest / the plants / the noodles / the bottom of the pot / the sink water / the smell of it / the lavender scented dish soap / the apartment

The word “years” / the skin on them looks older, older than you were / it hurts to think about it / Since you died / the sun and the street lights / day after day after day / I take in trace amounts of the dust you left behind. / The hair and the steady rhythm of sleeping.

mostly I don’t cry. I post pictures / shiny and legible, unreal. / I sink down inside the unstoried noise of the hole, it’s total incoherence. / the idea of the hole. / hard and smooth and portable. / the heat and the weight / the whole hurt / melting or crushing me / To live I carry it outwardly in a story.

a stone block, a brick on the front of my forehead. / it swells up in my joints / I feel like the rotten wooden / bones / My thighs remember / My hands remember / grief pools in different places.

The soil when I surface. The birds / Starlings, robins, chickadees, house wrens / The line between too much and not enough / more of an expanse a territory / It rains and it rains / and sweating becomes mulberries staining the sidewalk.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

#HammockResidency #sophiabartholomew #art #text

September 28 2024

  • Photos of some of the weavings in-process, with plants woven into rope, strung up on wooden frames made from scrap wood: 1. Leaning against the back door of Sophia’s cargo van.
  • Photos of some of the weavings in-process, with plants woven into rope, strung up on wooden frames made from scrap wood: 1. Leaning against the back door of Sophia’s cargo van. 2. Leaning against the side of the cargo van. 3. Leaning against an indoor wall, on a concrete floor.
  • Photos of some of the weavings in-process, with plants woven into rope, strung up on wooden frames made from scrap wood: 1. Leaning against the back door of Sophia’s cargo van. 2. Leaning against the side of the cargo van. 3. Leaning against an indoor wall, on a concrete floor.

For “This dream pays for its space in my heart” I’m also revisiting a work I’d made two years ago, with grasses and other plants woven into a polypropylene rope weft.

The title I’d given this work was “breath thread, earth hair”. As I’ve been standing in friends’ farm fields and in roadside ditches, making more weavings, I’ve felt another phrase rattling around in my mind, pushing it’s way out of my hands — / / Across all the fields and ditches between your body and mine / /

With the exception of some grasses, sumac, goldenrod and asters gifted by FASTWÜRMS, grown on the land they live on, I’ve collected the other plant materials travelling the distance between my studio and Richard’s grave.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Photos of some of the weavings in-process, with plants woven into rope, strung up on wooden frames made from scrap wood: 1. Leaning against the back door of Sophia’s cargo van. 2. Leaning against the side of the cargo van. 3. Leaning against an indoor wall, on a concrete floor.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

September 29 2024

A 4’x6’ frame made from pine lumber leans against the back door of a white cargo van. A yellow nylon rope weft is strung inside the frame, with a rough, textured weave of grasses and other plants spilling over the edges of of the frame. In the background is a field of tall grass bordered by trees.

“breath thread, earth hair” is a group of weavings made from grasses and other plants, nylon rope, marking paint, screws, poplar dowel, galvanized steel brackets, and scrap lumber.

The title is a kenning — an associative, allusive poetic device — linking grass, hair, breath, life, thread and earth, in a web of complex intra-action.

I love that kennings speak beside, instead of about, their subject. They name something by describing its relationship to something else.

In old norse cosmology, the human soul or spirit is carried by the breath, and it can be spun into a thread and sent forth from the body, using a form of magic. In the creation story, the world was grown from the corpse of the giant Ymir — Ymir’s hair was transformed into the plants and the trees of the earth, their flesh becoming the soil, their blood the oceans.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

October 1 2024

Photo offcuts form the negative space around Richard’s figure. They are taped to a white wall with green painter’s tape.

Underneath the logistical and emotional mess of this past year, underneath the mountain of many, many small tasks involved in trying to honour Richard as a person and as an artist, underneath all that there’s just the person who I loved and lived my life with who’s died. I still feel connected to him, some days more than others, but his /hamr/ – his body self – no longer walks this plane, and the life that we had together is gone.

It’s been so helpful to inhabit this online container through the month of September, as I’ve crossed over the threshold of the one year anniversary of Richard’s death. It’s felt meaningful to try and write about the some of the work I’ve made with him and about him, and to consider the ways our artistic interests and inquiries are linked.

Photo offcuts form the negative space around Richard’s figure. They are taped to a white wall with green painter’s tape.

PHOTO: sophia bartholomew @bartholomew.sophia

October 1 2024

It’s been such a gift to be a hammock resident this year. This last post marks the end of my month-long Instagram takeover, as part of my residency.

I’m looking forward to meeting the other Hammock artists-in-residence in Vancouver in a couple of months. We’ll all be sharing our residency work in a group exhibition at the James Black Gallery, November 8–15, myself and Kerri Flannigan, Jason Young, Jiji Buck, and Marita Michaelis. @flannyflannypack@jasonyoung.art@cadaslain@maritatoday

PHOTO: Kim Kozzi @kimkozzi

A photo of sophia standing in a field, bordered by trees and blue sky. They are looking directly at the camera, their arms full of grasses and other plants.

Artist Quick Links

sophia bartholomew

sophia bartholomew is a queer person and interdisciplinary artist, descended from Norwegian immigrants on Treaty 3 territory in rural Northwestern Ontario, and English and Irish settlers in and around so-called Toronto. Working outwards from the ruins and runes of their own cultural inheritance, their practice spans drawing, writing, sculpture- and installation-making, video, collaboration, and small, daily negotiations with found materials and household waste. Their work borrows its poetics from rural knowledge systems, including craft patterns and junk piles, folk stories and sagas, improvised adaptations and decisions of necessity. By engaging processes of transference and intra-action, their projects consider experiences of loss, physical fragility, interconnection and impermanence, while upholding queer practices of fluidity, adaptability, transformation, hope, and love. Recent group exhibitions include grass taps at the plumb, Loose Parts at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, All Flourishing Is Mutual with Images Festival, and this dream pays for its space in my heart at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery. sophia received their BFA from UBC in 2012 and their MFA from the University of Guelph in 2022. In 2023 they participated in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute.