Pair bears ‘Witnesses’

It took a while for painter Debbie Young and ceramist Jo Rowley to come up with a title for their new art exhibit, which features their two distinctly different art forms.

With their works already done, some of the discussion focused on whether a title was even necessary. But when Young came up with the idea of "witnessing," it made sense to Rowley.

"I realized it’s all about witnessing, and that’s when I realized we were very much alike," Rowley said.

"Witnesses," their newly opened exhibit at the Gallery at Ward Centre artists collective, features a series of Young’s dreamlike abstractions and Rowley’s playful figures. As to their precise subject matter, the works leave much to viewers’ imaginations, which the artists say is really the point.

"It’s the idea that we witness life not only with our eyes, but with our hearts," Rowley said.

In fact, Rowley worked very much from the heart while creating many of the works in the show. She molded the faces of many of her whimsical figures with her eyes closed, working from a "lump of clay" and with no emotion in mind other than "my love of the material and my desire to supersede my ability to see with my eyes — and could I do it."

"I was thinking about, if for some reason I couldn’t work in clay … what would happen?" she said. "So the eyes are off and the noses are off, and the mouths are kind of crooked. I just did the facial gesture, and then I opened my eyes and finished the piece."

The figures ended up looking surprisingly similar, with rounded heads and subtle features, as if from the same family. The mouth of one seems pursed, with a slight smile, leading Rowley to make it female and call it, appropriately enough, "Ponytails."

"The ponytails for me suggested sort of movement and energy," she said.

Young did not paint with her eyes closed, but her paintings lead you to visualize something beyond what you see. Her paintings suggest wind-whipped dunes, stormy seas or something deeper.

"All these paintings, they show parts of the land, the sea, the air," she said. "I looked at Jo’s work (and) my work and witnessing how the land and the sea and things that have been buried in the ground have been witness to changes."

Young used broad, blurred brush strokes on maple and birch panels coated with acrylic gesso. She etched a few curved lines into the surface to add a third dimension to the paintings.

"Unfolding" is a series of paintings depicting how life unfolds and how everything exists "in the moment," she said. "We’re all just evolving together."

That’s the technique, but for Young the work really begins with "breathing."

"It calms me down," she said. "I’m taking into account all the places I’ve traveled that day. Like, I swim two miles every day in the open ocean, so that plays into it. Or, I’ve traveled to northern India and vast open spaces of unfamiliarity to me, yet familiar. … So maybe the breathing helps take me there. It takes me from a place there to a place here."