Floating Pink Cloud

Alberta artist Alysse Bowd voices personal anxieties over women’s expanding gender roles.

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It’s hard to look at the news these days without coming across the word crisis. Be it climate, refugees or COVID-19, a profound sense of global upheaval permeates our lives. The torrent of headlines can throw our day-to-day struggles into perspective, making them seem insignificant or downright immaterial.

That’s what makes Alysse Bowd’s interdisciplinary performance-based exhibition, Floating Pink Cloud, which opened recently at Harcourt House, an Edmonton artist-run centre, both countercultural and captivating.

Bowd, a Red Deer-based conceptual artist and ceramicist who received a Master’s degree in fine arts in 2016 from NSCAD University in Halifax, focuses on intensely private moments: the worries that churn through us as we go about our days or try to sleep at night.

Such ephemeral moments inspire the poetic metaphors that fill Bowd’s art. For instance, Wonder, Wander, Stumbling Flower is simultaneously a permanent installation and the set for a performance. Created from recycled sheets, her suspended, floor-to-ceiling tubes evoke flower stems, sentinels or shrouds. Tiny white ceramic fences that neither protect nor confine surround each one.

During her opening-night performance, females ranging from children to elders stood in the fabric tubes, only their bare feet visible as they sighed, hummed, softly giggled or counted. The soundscape was occasionally interrupted by one of the group whispering words such as “be still.”

This performance took place simultaneously with one in Bowd’s adjoining installation, The Scream Catchers. The artist entered the gallery in a white nightdress and connected ceramic bottles to sculptures shaped like acoustic horns in a way that suggested a child’s string phone. She held the horns, one after the other, emitting increasingly piercing screams into their wide funnel. She then symbolically stored and preserved her screams by gently plugging the bottles.

The performance felt like something from a shamanic ritual or a church service. And, like most rites, the objective was to confront, soothe and perhaps even transcend vicissitudes.

Bowd is particularly keen to address women’s anxieties. Her show is filled with domestic archetypes: homes, fences, drapes and ceramic objects. At 30, she sees herself as “post-maiden” – the age when literary heroines have married and disappeared into domestic oblivion. 

Thus far, Bowd has managed to tick the right boxes for a career in the arts, including exhibitions, residencies, two university degrees and post-secondary teaching positions. Yet such accomplishments can seem irrelevant as she confronts the next stage of societal expectations: motherhood.

Society's standards for women are elastic and expand indefinitely. Young women today are expected to cope smoothly with careers, yet also uphold the most unrealistic expectations from the past in the domestic sphere.

As Bowd says, the perfection and happiness seemingly promised by the metaphor of the floating pink cloud is forever out of reach. Once a goal is achieved, another is made. Worries persist and the need for comforting rituals, such as pulling soft sheets over our eyes as we hum ourselves to sleep, remains. ■ 

Floating Pink Cloud was scheduled for Harcourt House in Edmonton from March 6 to April 18, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 crisis many galleries have closed temporarily. Please check ahead to confirm whether the gallery is open.

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Harcourt House Artist Run Centre

10215 112 Street - 3rd flr, Edmonton, Alberta T5K 1M7

780-426-4180

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