In honour of the internationally acclaimed Prince Edward Island artist, Hilda Woolnough (1934–2007), The Gallery at the Guild in Charlottetown has been officially renamed the Hilda Woolnough Gallery. On November 18, there will be a special celebration and grand opening of the first exhibition in the new space titled All Things Hilda: A Retrospective, which will be on view from November 17 to December 31. A long-time friend of the artist and former director of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Terry Graff, provides the following overview of Woolnough’s remarkable legacy.

It is said that you really don’t know someone until you’ve travelled with them. That’s how I first met Hilda Woolnough.

It was 1991, and we were both invited to serve on a jury for the Canada Council Art Bank, a task that involved a week-long road trip travelling together throughout the Atlantic region visiting artists in their studios and selecting works of art for purchase.

It was from this first-hand experience that I came to personally know Hilda’s love and passion for art and artists. She told many arresting stories, often poignant, many tinged with humour. This was a woman of substance, of vision and wisdom, of commitment and dedication. Fully present, even during the time when we weren’t looking at art, she emanated a distinct creative energy that was inspiring, that made living life an art form.

I remember during our road trip how she kept finding and collecting fallen bird feathers and, in particular, how her discovery of a feather was an uplifting, even spiritual experience. She considered feathers to be sacred gifts from the sky, ethereal and beautiful, messages and signs of good luck, symbols of hope. The poet Emily Dickinson referred to hope as “The thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all”.

Later on, during our road trip, we arrived at Hilda’s home in the village of Breadalbane for some of her famously delicious cooking. I noticed that among her intriguing objects was her marvellous hat, bedecked and bedazzled with bird feathers. They say “feathers appear when angels are near,” so I knew I was in the company of the “Angel of the Arts.” To this day, I pick up fallen feathers whenever I encounter them. However, I don’t stick them on a hat but have several places where I keep them, including strapped to the overhead sun visor in our car.

Hilda Woolnough,, Beach Series – Summer, 1973, intaglio print on paper, ed#810, CCAG, Gift of Printmakers Council of PEI Inc., 2007 [Collection Confederation Centre Art Gallery].

Hilda Woolnough, Giftbearer – Earth (from the Fishtales Series), 1986, graphite on paper, CCAG, Gift of Jennifer and David Whittlesey, 2013 [Collection Confederation Centre Art Gallery].

Hilda Woolnough, CROWS.

I wasn’t fully aware of the depth and breadth of Hilda’s art or of her numerous accomplishments as a cultural activist when we first met (they are legion), but I quickly got up to speed when I uprooted my family and moved to Prince Edward Island in 1993 to work at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. During our seven years on the Island, Hilda was of great help and support, a valued colleague and good friend. She introduced me to many of the local artists and members of the community and filled me in on the cultural history and politics of PEI. I also learned of her profound impact on the community, how she mentored and nurtured artists and how she was instrumental in establishing several visual arts organizations.

Indeed, she touched and changed so many lives, including that of painter Brian Burke. She recognized Brian’s exceptional talent in the early 1980s when she was the coordinator for the artist-run Great George Street Gallery and arranged for his first one-man show. She encouraged curator Pan Wendt, who stated, “She was a big help in pushing me into writing about art and into what I’m doing now.” Laura Brandon, former Historian, Art & War at the Canadian War Museum, who met Hilda in 1979 when she moved with her family to PEI, made this comment: “Hilda loved PEI. and during the years I lived there, she introduced me to its beauty through her art. . . . She believed in cycles, the seasons, regeneration, and in patterns. . . . She met all my expectations of what an artist should be. She dressed dramatically, looked exotic, lived in a disintegrating building full of interesting things, and created all the time, whether it was art, food, gardens, or indeed, arts organizations.”

Artist and art writer Lucy Hogg, who was born and raised in PEI and is now living in New York City, shared the following personal memory:

I met Hilda through her daughter Lee. We were in the 8th grade together at Queen Charlotte High School.  Lee’s last name was Hopkins, so in our home-room class she was always seated directly behind me. She usually had her nose in a book and seemed beatifically unaware of the nasty high-school food-chain politics I often felt I was a victim of. I stuck with her.

Eventually, I would go home to her house to hang out, where I met Hilda, Lee’s brothers, Daniel and John, and Réshard Gool, Hilda’s partner, who usually had some amused sardonic commentary to offer on whatever was going on. Their household was my first introduction to an alternative life. Everybody was elegant in an offhand way, and the house frequently had an aroma I couldn’t identify, but it smelled interesting. I took my cues. At home, I decorated my bedroom door with a bead curtain, attempted some mood lighting, and acquired a black turtle-neck, the latter of which must have looked ridiculously retro to them. I almost set my parents’ house on fire burning some failed poetry in my wastepaper basket. I masked the incident with my newly acquired incense.

My most vivid memory of Hilda is of a rare day when I was out walking with her and Lee. We were on the corner of Great George St. and Euston (their house was just up the street).  I was wearing my turtleneck although it was too warm a day for it. I suddenly noticed that Lee had new glasses. Hilda informed me that Lee had been wearing her glasses for a few weeks and that I really had better notice things like that more quickly if I was going to call myself an artist. I was duly chastised, but it was the first time someone inferred to me that I might end up being an artist. From then on it seemed to me that the primary function of an artist was to see things; that it didn’t matter so much what they did, but how they saw.

That has had a lasting impact on me, especially now as I adapt as a visual artist in a rapidly changing and unstable world. Artists in whatever their capacity should be watching at all times, and commenting in whatever way they can. Hilda did that in her own work, and she did so much to vitalize the Charlottetown community, to make it a place she could continue to thrive in. I am so pleased that the gallery is being named for her.

For Hilda Woolnough, art was a compulsion, more than a way of life, a way of being fully alive in the world, of feeling and thinking and, as Lucy Hogg points out, of seeing. A sign on the wall in her studio read: “Have you used your eyes today?”, and her 1978 catalogue of drawings was titled “Eyescapes”.

Hilda’s art production over her lifetime embraced a wide range of media: drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, jewellery, weavings, and quilts, and explored an equally vast range of perceptions, ideas, and the big themes of life, birth and death. She most often worked in series and found inspiration in nature, creating miniature “Antscapes”, anthropomorphic wave and rock images, embryonic shapes, and evocative biomorphic transformations of male and female bodies. Her art was highly personal as she dealt with the emotions of grief, anger, fear, pain, and joy in her life, and although much of it derived from her experience in her homeplace of PEI, she was a world traveller, backpacking through Asia and Europe and spending time in India, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. She was very aware of world events, and fiercely made work that was pointedly political, such as her powerful expression of the faceless prisoners of Guantanamo Bay that toured internationally, including to Japan.

One of the special privileges of being a curator is the opportunity to visit artists’ studios and to see and learn first-hand about their art processes. Hilda experimented with materials and was always pushing the medium that she was working with, forming her imagery and communicating her vision through its material qualities. She once stated, “I suppose I am like the elephant’s child, insatiably curious. I want to see what will happen if! I am an aquarian, it’s my nature to experiment!”

Hilda Woolnough, The Hours from Timepiece series, collagraph 1996-99.

Hilda Woolnough, Ancestors (Screens) from Timepiece installation.

After witnessing her complex collagraph printing process in the production of her “Timepiece” series, which involved repeated sanding and inking and the creation of sculptural frames using found objects, I confirmed her exhibition at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and contracted artist and art writer Linda Rae Dornan to curate it. Linda made this comment about “Timepiece”: “Woolnough extends the concept of print-making beyond the traditional and the predictable. . . . Her installation is a quiet oasis of reflection, presenting remembrances, belief systems, the continuity of human fallibility, and the acceptance of the growth and the deterioration of everything within life’s passage.”

It’s impossible to encapsulate here the many various series of Hilda’s work and the full artistic terrain that she explored, but it’s important to note that drawing was her central form of expression, a potent way for her to connect to the senses, the body, and the mind. She viewed and approached drawing as an autonomous or independent art form, not as a minor or preparatory artistic effort subordinate to painting or any other art form. Her friend and fellow artist Erica Rutherford stated: “Hilda Woolnough has made a definite contribution to drawing as a major form of expression. . . .There is nothing accidental about the self-assurance with which she marks the paper with graphite. She displays a sure hand of authority with each tone and line.” Moncrieff Williamson, the founding director of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, proclaimed that Hilda Woolnough’s drawings have “assured her reputation as an artist entitled to take her place as one of the foremost draughtsmen and draughtswomen in Canada.” Indeed, in 1979, her work was presented alongside many of the male giants of Canadian art like Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, A.Y. Jackson, Jack Shadbolt, Alex Colville, Harold Town, and Jean-Paul Riopelle in the exhibition 20th Century Canadian Drawings organized by Gallery Stratford in Ontario. Championing women artists, curator Joan Murray, included Hilda’s work in her 1987 book “The Best Contemporary Canadian Art”, and organized a major exhibition of Hilda’s “Fishtales” series that toured nationally from 1987-1990. It featured 32 prophetic drawings that formed an imaginative science fiction mythology about the beginning of life on Earth following a nuclear holocaust that resulted in the extinction of human beings.

Hilda Woolnough, Waiting 3, 1994, mixed media on paper, 112.0 x 78.0 cm, [Collection John Hopkins].

Hilda Woolnough, The Disappearing Woman, 1994, mixed media on paper, 112.0 x 78.0 cm, [Collection John Hopkins].

Hilda Woolnough, Butterfly No. 3, 1964, relief print on paper, CCAG, Gift of the Gibbard Furniture Shops Ltd, 1964 [Collection Confederation Centre Art Gallery].

I remember during a particular visit to Hilda’s studio in the early 1990s, how I paused to ponder over one of her dynamic drawings titled “Space Shot”. Exemplifying her skill at expressing motion, its subject was a flying dart accompanied by a small pink heart in the centre of a circle. When she caught me studying it, she smiled like a Cheshire cat and didn’t murmur a word about its possible meaning. In retrospect, I think this drawing could very well stand in as a portrait of the artist. For me, it represents a focused mission, the dart a symbol of striving to achieve a goal or to reach a target, shooting across white unknown space with unerring instinct and intuition, persistence, and breadth of vision in what was for Hilda an expression of love.

Hilda’s artistic mission shot well beyond the edges of a sheet of paper to pierce the community and world at large. It involved the tireless promotion of the arts as integral to community-building and to all of life, revealing time and time again how they are vital to the cultural, social, and economic fabric and prosperity of society, how they can act as a catalyst for social change, and how they can enrich the lives of everyone. From organizing children’s art exhibitions and Students’ Art Expo, to the development with her partner Reshard Gool of an alternative newspaper and Square Deal Press, and to her instrumental role in the creation of many artistic organizations, including the Phoenix Gallery, the Gallery-On-Demand, Great George Street Gallery, the PEI Printmakers’ Council, the P.E.I. Council of the Arts, and the Arts Guild, Hilda left an indelible mark on Prince Edward Island, and also nationally as director of the Canadian Conference of the Arts from 1989 to 1996.

She was a bright and shining light, a champion of artists and artists’ rights, loved and respected by all those whose lives she touched. She ignited numerous hearts and minds with the magic of art and its great power for transforming lives.

The inaugural posthumous Late Great Award bestowed on her from the City of Charlottetown, and the renaming of The Gallery at the Guild as “The Hilda Woolnough Gallery” are acts of profound gratitude that honour the extraordinary legacy of the Island’s “Angel of the Arts”, inspiring hope, “that thing with feathers”, for the future prosperity of the arts.

Terry Graff is a visual artist, art writer, and independent curator. He has curated over 200 exhibitions, is the author of numerous articles and books on both contemporary and historical art and artists, and is a former director of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (PEI), Rodman Hall Arts Centre (Ontario), the Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatchewan), and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (New Brunswick).

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