Eric Murphy, Centretown News A detail from Anna Torma’s Bagatelles 1,6, one of the three centre tapestries.
A pirate perched on a rose, a beast with four legs and a human face, and Parisian gardens.
You can spot all of these images embroidered into just one silk tapestry in city hall’s newest art exhibition, Bagatelles by Anna Torma. Named after a rose garden near Paris, flowers permeate the exhibit’s main works, three of which hang from the ceiling in the building’s Karsh-Masson Gallery.
“I was always a gardener,” says Hungarian-born Torma, who now lives in New Brunswick. “I was probably born a gardener.”
During Torma’s presentation on the collection, she flipped through a slideshow that featured her plants as often as her artwork. You can spot many of these flowers in Torma’s tapestries, embroidered alongside fire-breathing lizards and carnivorous whales with pointed teeth. Real plants she’s grown in her kitchen are sewn identically onto the silk.
According to Torma, showing real things is essential. She puts her own world into her art. Of course, with this dedication to real life, where do the monsters come in?
“I raised two kids, and watched how they approached everyday life,” she says. “And their life was absolutely full of monsters and scary things.”
For Torma’s young children, now grown, the pirate in their closet or the dragon beneath their bed was just as real as their mother’s flowers. Through her children, Torma was able to experience these fears first hand, they became part of her world as well.
“I saw the monsters through my kids’ eyes . . . and it must be incorporated into the garden, my real world.”
The monster images came from the children’s real drawings. Now that Torma’s children are adults, she’s had to rely on an archive of their “decaying” pictures that she’s collected over the years. In an article she wrote for The Walrus, Torma said she wants to “steal the intensity behind them . . . children draw because the desire is there. With embroidery, I can save the desire.”
In Bagatelles, Torma has certainly managed to capture the intensity and wonder of children’s art. Fantastic beasts fill the silk sheets. Standing in front of it, Bagatelles 1,6 looks like an enormous battle between raging monsters spewing fire with a naked woman and electric-blue fire trapped in the centre. But blink once, and it’s just as easy to see these beasts playfully exploring, and the human becomes an invader. Stylized letters at the top read: “who may I ask, is the beast?”
Other works are much less chaotic. While Bagatelles 1,6 is unified by a colour palette of reds and soft pinks, Bagatelles 3, also hanging in the centre of the room, uses the same pink dyes but with blue gardens and green leaves scattered throughout. It’s less overwhelming, with extra white space between the images making it easier to take in every detail, and it’s the detail that really makes these pieces so fascinating. The tiny images invite the viewer to stand with their nose almost pressed against the tapestry.
Other beautiful and intricate works hang along the small gallery’s walls, but the three hanging tapestries are undoubtedly the stars of the show.
Bagatelles will remain in the Karsh-Masson Gallery until Aug. 10, admission is free.