Gathie Falk
Nationality: Canadian
Born: 1928-01-31, Alexander, Manitoba, Canada

Gathie Falk makes paintings, sculptures, installations and performance works, of and with objects relating to her domestic environment. Furniture, clothing, shoes, flowers, vegetables, and plumbing fixtures have all recurred as imagery through Falk's many different media, and have all been inflected by her strong religious convictions. Born into a Mennonite family, and a believer in Christian values, Falk creates art that expresses her veneration of the ordinary—her awe and respect for the materials and processes of everyday life.

Falk was born in 1928 in Alexander, Manitoba and has lived in Vancouver since 1947. She came to a career in the visual arts in her mid-thirties, after initial studies in music and 12 years spent as a primary school teacher. Although painting has been her principal medium since 1978, her early reputation was established as a performance artist and ceramic sculptor.

For her first exhibition of ceramic sculpture, held in 1968 at the Douglas Gallery, Vancouver, Falk recreated an entire living room, Home Environment. She furnished it with altered found objects and ceramic replicas of domestic articles, juxtaposed in disconcerting ways. (Two ceramic "fish" are placed on the armrests of an old easy chair, which has been painted pink, and a headless, trussed chicken is deposited in a bird cage.) The commonplace subjects and absurdist sensibilities of Home Environment and other early works seem to align Falk with the traditions of the Pop, Surrealist and Dada movements. However, an ongoing struggle for Falk has been freeing her art from interpretations of womanly domesticity.

Another important installation, Herd One, 1974-75, is composed of 24 painted wooden horses suspended by transparent wire about a foot above the ground. Cut out of plywood and painted on both sides, the sculptures are two-dimensional versions of the play horses children ride on carousels and in supermarkets. They are transformed in subtle ways into stampeding dream creatures—frightened, fleeing wild. Here, the friendly and familiar strangely coincide with the unknown and uncontrollable.

Source: "Gathie Falk," Vancouver Art Gallery Collection. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1993.