‘Contemporary embroidered textiles on the related themes of sailing, navigation and weather’.
Bettina Matzkuhn is an embroiderer. She is a painter with fabric, linens and threads. I wondered how she would fill The ACT/Maple Ridge Art Gallery with embroideries so I chose to take myself out to Maple Ridge to see her show, on the Saturday afternoon when she was scheduled to give an Artist’s Talk. This has become my favoured way of seeing a show, rather than attend busy openings when you chat with fellow visitors but rarely have enough time or space to take in the artwork properly. Plus I love slide shows and explanations of what led to a particular body of work.
Bettina has filled the gallery with her needle-work, and these are not delicate small pieces. One is greeted by the sight of several actual canvas sails, held aloft by rigging, walls covered with butterfly-shaped embroideries, a funnel and samples of unusual symbols.
A good crowd of interested visitors was seated amongst the sails, and Gallery curator Barbara Duncan (see my previous blog) introduced Bettina. We’ve seen many of Bettina’s works, often in the Crafts Council Gallery, so know that she is passionate about hiking and BC’s ‘great outdoors’. We found out that she is equally fond of sailing and meteorology. Heaven knows when she finds time to actually sit and create, engrossed in her painstaking work with needle and thread. She explained that her father was a life-long sailing fanatic, even living on board his vessel for some thirty years. Bettina enjoyed weekends and summer holidays afloat. There she acquired her love of weather predictions, clouds, the ocean and maps. Since then she has spent time with a professional sail-maker, wood and metal workers and with the help of a BCAC Grant made the sails and the little animated weather movie. She has had a residency in Newfoundland. 
Gradually she has accumulated a vast array of work associated with these studies. The sails are faithfully replicated examples of real sails, with special seams allowing for the wind to billow them, which she has then embellished with scraps of unlikely fabrics, all hand stitched to the machine-sewn sails.
One wall features those butterfly-shaped pieces (Schmetterlinge in German) and it turns out that they are world maps, designed so that the countries aren’t distorted like in the traditional rectangular ones we usually see. On these shapes she has sewn colours which may represent clouds, ocean and the colours of land and plants to produce really pleasing fabric art pieces. I will post her description here. Do click on it to enlarge it and read.
Another wall piece is inspired by a ‘weather funnel’. Again, do read her description and the list of the variety of materials she has used for its embroidery.
One corner of the gallery is covered with ‘Sentences’, 180 blue squares, each of which is embroidered with a meteorological symbol, used by those folks on their maps.
I’ll let my photos give you an idea of the show rather than try to tell you more of what we learned in her talk. But her website gives a link to further publications on her work. Bettina is a prolific writer for the Crafts community, a long-time volunteer and current Chair of CCBC and it’s good to see a large body of her own work. Thank you, Bettina, for my very worthwhile drive to Maple Ridge to see your show, and an informative, enjoyable talk.
Click on ‘news’ in Bettina’s website below:
