ANGELIKA WERTH: "Madeleines," May 28 - June 9, 2005, Alberta Craft Council Gallery, Edmonton

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"Ode to Canada and the RCMP (detail)"

Angelika Werth, "Ode to Canada and the RCMP (detail)," hand-felted wool and silk, with the integration of fragments from an RCMP wool blanket.

ANGELIKA WERTH

Madeleines, May 28 - June 9, 2005

Alberta Craft Council Gallery, Edmonton

By Mary Joyce

Such is the attraction of British Columbia that an artist who holds a degree as a master dressmaker-designer from Hannover, Germany, and has worked for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, makes her life in Nelson. Angelika Werth’s felted and quilted pieces are exhibited and sold internationally, and she teaches her skills all over BC. This summer, the ACC Gallery displays three of her waistcoats for Canadian heroines: Ethyl Wilson, Sheila Copps and an anonymous logger. They are similar in concept and technique to Werth’s Madeleines, 12 sculptural, felted dresses. In that collection, each outfit has a pair of matching sports gloves — representing the freeing of the women through sports — and each is built around a brassière technique that has been at the heart of Werth’s practice since 1992. The dress sculptures embody in their fabric the spirits of the heroic women of history for whom they are named; they are constructed, as Werth writes, of: “wool... that resists iron and fire… ultra-feminine elements that make the felt stronger; felted armour with subtle strength not obvious to the viewer… horse hair interfacing, whale boning, silk velvet linings and up to 12 metres of hand-felted material.”

Represented by: Alberta Craft Council Gallery, Edmonton.