On Thursday, April 25, the Ottawa Art Gallery will be holding the opening ceremony for the exhibition Spanning the Divide. This exhibition features the works and thesis pieces from three of the graduates from uOttawa’s MFA program: Kelly Rendek, Heer Mandaliya, and Sarah Tompkins. I had the chance to sit down with them and talk to them about each of their respective works.
Spanning the Divide is on display at the OAG. Photo by Vasileios Tselios.
Sculptures of home
Apt613: Could you please talk to us about your work?
Kelly Rendek: My work is in the big room. It’s the spiral sculpture that has other elements in the room, the preparatory work and the painting. It’s all one installation. That work is called “The Practice of Home.” It came out of this idea that I have moved a lot, and lived in different countries, and just this idea of what is home? People would say where is home and I would say I don’t know. As I worked and researched this piece, it became the idea that it’s really about my habits, it’s not about where I am.
Work by Kelly Rendek. Photo by Vasileios Tselios.
What did your artistic process look like?
KR: It’s a process. Sometimes people think that you have an idea and it’s fully formed and then you just make it. Mine is not like that at all. The idea was I want to make this portable thing that represents home. My advisor kept asking “what is it going to look like” and I kept saying “I don’t know”. I knew I wanted to be 3 dimensional, but I didn’t know how to do this. So I just went to the dollar store, and I bought a whole lot of stuff and I started making little 3D things of different shapes, playing around with them. I spent a couple months thinking “What do I want to do here?”. It took a couple months before I decided to make the spiral. My defence was in August, and I would say up until July, I didn’t know what it was going to like. It just kind of came together one day, I walked in and said “this is how it gets finished.”
“They were the same floors as the floors in India”
Apt613: What was your inspiration for your work?
Heer Mandaliya: My inspiration started from home. Because I left India and I came here, feeling very alone. I didn’t know anybody here. When I entered my student dorm, the first thing I noticed were the floors, they were the same floors as the floors in India. I was like ok, even though I am miles away from my house, I am still getting that familiar feeling. So I started with that. Nostalgia also worked a lot. When I left home, I learned the importance of being back home.
How was it like working on a 3D piece compared to your usual art
HM: I used to depict it the floor on the wall. Then, I was talking to somebody and they said to try it on the floor. So I said “let me try it.” I started to make floor pieces. It was originally a wall piece, but then I put it on the floor and it created an atmosphere around it. It was inviting you to walk on it, but you can’t actually walk on it. I tried using different materials for it.
Works by Heer Mandaliya. Photo by Vasileios Tselios.
The reason for using cardboard was the packages that I would receive from home. They were in a cardboard box and they were all the memories and things that I liked from home. Cardboard is such an everyday thing.
A studio of own’s own
Apt613: Was there a specific reason you wanted that specific room to display the painting?
Sarah Tompkins: I wanted that room to refer to the intimacy of the original studio space, where its scale
took on an imposing quality—in the gallery, it becomes a physical experience that mimics my own process of working through the painting. I could only back up so much in my studio to get a sense of it, and it was never quite far enough.
There was a part of me that wanted the viewer to have that same feeling of sensory overwhelm; of wanting to back up to see its totality, but backing into a wall that keeps you in the chaos of searching for a complete understanding of the thing.
Work by Sarah Tompkins. Photo by Vasileios Tselios.
Why is the painting so big?
ST: The first feeling about that painting was that it was my first studio of my own—I had Virginia Woolf on the mind. Women are generally conditioned to understand themselves through the roles and duties that we fulfil for others. Choosing to work at a monumental scale on a tight timeline set up conditions that demanded all of that energy—there was something deeply feminist and almost transgressive about it. It felt like an intimate and sacred thing between me and the studio during this precious, almost secret time where I could think and move and breathe just for myself. The painting was conceptualised through a kind of intensity around seizing that opportunity and leaving nothing on the table while trying to get at the size of that feeling.
What does your artistic process look like, going from conception to realisation?
ST: In terms of this painting, because I am working from this immediate approach to abstraction, I don’t do sketches or studies. It was really about trying to work intuitively through an expanding lexicon of painting. That process has a logic to it, but when it came to actually making moves I focused on the sensorial. I prioritised what felt right, and ultimately the work became a meditation on the truth of feeling—something that emerges from the body rather than the mind.
Spanning the Divide: Art from the University of Ottawa Department of Visual Arts, 2023 officially opens on April 25. For more information, see the OAG’s website.
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