A Prescription for Health

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Gloria Mok, “Whose feathers are these?” 2022

mixed media and cigar box, 9" x 6.5" x 1" (photo by John Freeman)

Gloria Mok, a retired family physician, has made carefully reasoned decisions all her life – at least during the day. In the evenings, starting in her early thirties, she immersed herself in making art, where imagination has no limits, mistakes are fortuitous and everything seems possible. 

People who go to her show, Lost World, on view until May 7 at the McMullen Gallery in Edmonton’s University of Alberta Hospital, leave behind the stress, hurried hallways and clamour of medical equipment. Instead, they are treated to vibrant collages that combine natural history illustrations with iridescent bugs, speckled feathers, fish bones and the like. 

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Gloria Mok, “Did our ancestors live here?” 2022

collage, 24" x 36" x 2" (photo by John Freeman)

Logic and reason seem distant in her series of mixed-media diptychs. Various species of birds, some adorned with actual feathers, seem to converse with each other. One work is titled “Did our ancestors live here?” and features two parrots. Perched on leafy branches on opposite sides of the diptych, they are juxtaposed with the gridded streets of an old map of Los Angeles, where there is little space for plants or animals.

The piece’s whimsical humour plays with the history of the city’s feral parrots. The exotic birds proliferated after the 1961 Bel Air brush fire, when people are thought to have released them to escape the flames. But Mok’s work is also a lament for habitat loss. “Individually, you can do something like generate less waste,” she says. “There are things we can do to bring back . . . our environment.” 

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Gloria Mok, “Don’t you want to be my friend?” 2022

mixed media and cigar box, 8.5" x 6.5" x 2" (photo by John Freeman)

Still, the show is not a heavy-handed call to action. Like German Surrealist Max Ernst, whose collages inspired Mok, playful and illogical associations disrupt routine ways of thinking. For instance, her mysterious treasure boxes unravel ordinary concepts of time’s passage. The inside of the lid of one box, These feathers are not ours!, shows a faded image of a historical cabinet of curiosities, a precursor to the modern museum. The cabinet’s wooden partitions transition seamlessly to the cigar box walls. The blue bird in the foreground and the real feathers inside the box create the unsettling sense that reality and its printed illustrations have merged. 

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Gloria Mok, “These feathers are not ours!” 2022

mixed media and cigar box, 9.5" x 7" x 2" (photo by John Freeman)

Mok believes creativity’s mental freedom is vital for everyone. “Our life is essentially in a box,” she says. Our homes and offices are cubes, and our bodies are often perceived as metaphorical boxes. “I think it’s useful for every person to develop something that’s away from what they do as a day job,” she says. “You’ll never know where it goes. I started off as an amateur with little formal education and here I am, an artist.”

In this show, her advice is backed with action. The gallery offers visitors an envelope of images to make their own collages. Think of it as filling a medical prescription to lose ourselves in daydreams. ■

Lost World at the McMullen Gallery in the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton from March 11 to May 7, 2023.

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