8 Women - Aging Boldly
“Beautiful young people are works of nature. Beautiful old people are works of art.” Eleanor Roosevelt
The history of figurative art has long been dominated by the ‘male gaze’ most often depicting women young, nubile and half clothed. The figures of elderly females are practically non-existent in galleries, museums and art history books - subject to the ageism prevalent in our culture - making many feel irrelevant and invisible.
To fully explore this focus, I invited a group of eight female artists, ages 60 - 83, to participate in a nude photo shoot at Wreck Beach in Vancouver in June of 2022. Supported by a Canada Council Explore and Create grant, and photographed by veteran Vancouver photographer Vince Hemingson, each of us took that bold yet exhilarating experience to turn an unflinching gaze at our aging bodies and explore being our own subject matter in a medium and style of choice. Our motivation was to challenge the constructs imposed by our culture on how we are viewed as aging women and creatives.
All of us came away inspired and changed by our participation that day - it was a shift in mindset and creative impulses. Over the following months we stayed closely connected - meeting regularly to visit each other’s studios, sharing ideas and progress, supporting and inspiring each other. Through this the idea of a documentary was born and an experienced filmmaker joined our Aging Boldly group. We all believed this excitement and resulting new artwork should be exhibited, captured on film, and shared with the broader community to be a catalyst for wider conversations about aging, the beauty of the aging body, and the spark of creativity which can be found in the later decades of life.
My resulting installation ‘I have felt nothing ever like the wild wonder of that moment’ is a series of collaborative mixed media portraits of each of these women. On large diamond shaped substrates a figure painted in monochromatic walnut ink on translucent mylar is stepping out of or through a colourful collaged vulva-like shape created from each women’s own art - poems, paper weavings, painted canvases, cut-outs etc. Each portrait is a direct reflection of the body of the woman incorporated with their own artistic output.
I am honoured to work with this group of accomplished women. We have twice exhibited our work. Entitled On the Beach - an exhibit about older women by older women. In June, 2024 we held an inaugural exhibit at Edge Studio Gallery in Vancouver, and in May, 2025 we exhibited at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt.
See attached review: https://www.coastreporter.net/local-arts/artists-drop-everything-to-define-power-of-age-at-sunshine-coast-arts-centre-10733076?
A more informal Bio written for the exhibition On the Beach