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| | ARTIST NAME: | Dickerson, Katharine | | ACCESSION NUMBER: | 2000.059.001 | | TITLE: | ALPINE MEADOW | | DATE: | 1995 | | CATEGORY: | Fibre | | MEDIUM: | dye, paint, natural dyed | | SUPPORT: | woven cotton, silk | | DIMENSIONS: | Actual: 74.5 x 99 cm (29 5/16 x 39 in.) | | COLLECTION: | Alberta Foundation for the Arts |
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| | OTHER HOLDINGS: | Dickerson, Katharine | | ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Described by Western Living as “an important weaver in Western Canada because she is taking the medium further than anyone else,” Katharine Dickerson weaves massive sculptures without using foam or wire mesh. As influenced by Salish and Maori twining techniques as she is motivated by science and computers, Dickerson artistically and pedagogically engages the communities she visits or where she lives. Despite a reading disability, she is an academic and essayist of profound yet accessible articles.
Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Dickerson pursued ceramics, painting, and theatre technology through institutions such as the Craft Students League in New York and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She studied weaving at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine.
Following the death of her mother in 1972, and having concluded that her reading disability provided her “natural ability” in oral cultures, Dickerson went to B.C. to study Salish weaving and memorialise her mother via loom-work. After moving to a remote area of Vancouver Island without electricity or telephone, she affirmed her belief in the indivisibility of art and artists from their cultural context. As she wrote her essay “Aho Tapu: The Sacred Weft,” “the contextualisation of processes, material usage, and the intent of the making, transcends a purely technical or skills-based construction…. [I]ntangible essence… is more than the sum of its materials and techniques.”
In 1977, Dickerson became Head of the Textiles Department at the Alberta College of Art + Design, where she taught for 30 years. From 1982 to 1984 she was Director of the Canadian Crafts Council and the Alberta Crafts Council. In 2000, she worked with First Nations women in Saskatchewan to teach collecting, dyeing, and weaving at the Stardale Women’s Centre in Melfort.
“Westcoast Forest,” one of Dickerson’s most famous installations, includes two sections of four meter by four and a half meter panels and 455 kg of hopsacking (coarse fabric), jute (burlap fibre), and baling twine. Dickerson took a year to complete it, using as much recycled hopsacking as possible on a loom she designed based on a Coast Salish blanket loom. As of 2003, she began weaving on a 16-harness countermarche Levard loom built in the late 1880s.
Dickerson’s essays address differences between oral and text cultures, and how developments in quantum physics, neurology, developmental psychology, and the philosophies regarding them should affect artists’ and academics’ theories and teaching. Long before artists widely adopted computers for art creation, Dickerson urged artists to focus on user experience to amplify user perception, rather than merely to offload processing, and argued presciently that graphical interface would vastly improve user experience over mere textual or numerical input. Weaving, she said, allowed students to “learn through both analytical deduction and full body experience,” because weaving employs binary composition while remaining thoroughly tactile.
Dickerson’s work has had numerous solo exhibitions across Canada and the U.S., and resides in numerous public and private collections. After retiring to Slocan Valley to continue weaving and writing, Dickerson was named Lecturer Emeritus by the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2009. |
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