Review of  the Mary E. Rawlyk Exhibition

by Anne Sikora

Kingston Whig Standard, 22 Nov. 1986.
at the Kingston Public Library, Kingston, ON ( from the Robert McLaughlin Gallery ,Oshawa ON.)

The Menial Apron as Social Message and Art Object

Rawlyk is interested in the meanings these domestic objects have within the lives of women. Her work carries a clear message about the place women occupy in the work force.

The subject of Mary Rawlyk’s exhibition of prints in the Wilson Room at the Kingston Public Library, is the Housewife’s apron: delicate, lacey 1950s’ versions of the sort one might find at the Salvation Army Thrift Store nowadays. But Rawlyk’s aprons are not simply a witty documentation of an era gone by; they are live representations of emotional states- anger, exhaustion and futility-which convey the plight of real women trapped in domestic situations that stifle their creative and intellectual activities.

“The basic injustice in Canada and all over the world, is the expectation that women will do unpaid domestic labour in an isolated workplace whether they have paid employment outside the house or not.” says Rawlyk about the political content of her work. And the theme of women in conflict with their environment runs consistently through the three series in the exhibition, series which explore aprons and housewives who are trapped in egg cartons and measuring cups.

Rawlyk, who has been a printmaker in Kingston for the past 14 years, began making prints of house hold objects – her washing machine, stove iron and scissors- because they were integral parts of the most natural parts of her environment to consult. “I remember times when I desperately wanted to make prints about aspects of landscape, but could not free myself from domestic commitments long enough to study and experience the phenomena that I wanted to deal with,”she remembers.

The prints in her Domestic Object Series (1972-1978) explore elements of design, the relationship of lines, the patterning of fabric and the effects created through a combination of printmaking techniques. But these early works also introduce a tension which is continued and developed in the Apron Series later. It is a conflict between Rawlyk’s love for the fabric and the simple lines of domestic objects and her simultaneous distaste for the stifling connotations that are implied by theses same objects. In sewing, for example, Rawlyk has accentuated the rich, intricate texture of lace by printing it on a black background, while leaving the sewing machine, a flat stencil outline,  as an alienating mechanical image isolated on its white border.

Rawlyk’s work is reminiscent of Sixties’ Pop Art imagery– Jim Dine’s series of bathrobes, for example -in its transferring of ordinary objects, such as clothing , into the legitimate territory of art. But Rawlyk is more interested in the meanings which these domestic objects have within the lives of women. Her work carries a clear message about the place women occupy in the work force. One problem with this kind of art – political art – is that its social message often supercedes  its visual one. The interest is in what is being said rather than how it is being said. Fortunately, Rawlyk does not often have this problem. Her work is interesting and original enough visually to balance its strong feminist content. I say “often” because this is not always the case. In Apron Flag for example, Rawlyk’s outrage at the way women were reluctantly included in the Canadian Constitution is expressed through a somewhat obvious and uninspired Canadian Flag.

In contrast to this, the Housewife Series (1981-1982) uses an apt and imaginative metaphor to express the housewife’s alienation from her environment. Rawlyk inserts a photograph of herself, in which she looks burdened and tired, between various household objects, so that she literally takes on the mundane quality of the objects, as she looks through or is trapped inside their confining presence. There is a haunting quality about some of the prints, as the image of the artist is magnified grotesquely in a measuring cup or becomes part of a lard container. The effect is heightened by printing the image on the top part of the print in black, so that her trapped photograph looms down at the viewer through the negative space at the bottom of the print.

One is struck by the realism of Rawlyk’s technique: her insistence on using her own picture in the Housewife Series or the original scale of the apron in her Apron Series. Yet in both cases she makes a significant departure into fantasy, a comic and scary world in which aprons come to life and cake racks imprison their user. These transformations are believable because they convey a corresponding world in which these problems exist. Rawlyk is herself a housewife and her art has always had to be balanced against the pressures of a domestic environment. “ There are times when I feel my very soul and creativity are extinguished by household trivia. Many prints never reach completion because of domestic disruptions, many a print has been taken off the press while the family sheets and towels plunged in the suds in the washer.”

Plans for future work are delayed as usual by domestic concerns. Rawlyk is currently working on the renovations of her house. But when she is able to get back to her work, she hopes to further explore the theme of women’s unpaid domestic labour.  “ I have and enormous body of unfinished work. There are still some ideas for the Housewife Series which I hope to explore. There are still some aprons which I would like to print.” In the meantime, her works hang in the gallery, a visual statement that touches the lives of real women. As one woman viewing the exhibition comments, “That’s me in that apron. I recognize that”