Mary Shannon Will

Obsessive surface patterning marks veteran Calgary artist’s work.

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For nearly 50 years, Mary Shannon Will has made a compelling case for her art – pointillist dots and all. It began with her ceramic sculpture: so different, so unique, that even to this day, these works stand out. With their carefully balanced geometric shapes and laborious abstract surface treatments, these precisely made white earthenware pieces are a study in perfection and beauty. If ever there was an outlier in both Canadian art and Canadian fine craft, it’s her sculpture.

The same can be suggested about her later 2-D work, which superseded her ceramics in the mid-1980s. It marked another adventure that has continued almost to this day with a repertoire of decorative marks involving thousands of tiny dots, dashes, overlapping lines and other surface patterns. Add to this, as well, an instinct for colour – in nearly every pigment and every shade – and the experience in front of her art can be mesmerizing.

Neither childlike nor frivolous, the Calgary artist’s obsessive and mind-boggling art made for concentrated but enjoyable viewing at her survey exhibition, People, Places and Things, on display until Oct. 10 at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary. Her practice brings to mind the Pattern and Decoration movement of the late 1970s, which sought to restore the status of decoration, especially as it applied to the domestic arts of women and non-Western cultures. But, as the curator of this exhibition, Diana Sherlock, makes clear in her research, Shannon Will’s links are with “recurring processes and procedures … to produce controlled yet intuitive works of art in response to the people, places and things in her life.” 

While there may be a superficial overlap with the Pattern and Decoration movement, this American-educated artist – the University of Iowa, the University of New Mexico and the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana – has more allegiance with conceptual art. Rather than relying solely on her intuition, feelings and personal tastes to generate a work, she proceeds according to a set of specific ideas and rules of her own making. In other words, discipline over the pleasures of free choice. 

Central to this principle in her 2-D work is her frequent use of the grid as way to compositionally organize and contain all the visual information, particularly mark making. It works, up to a point, but thankfully, and even surreptitiously, there’s as much enthusiasm, concentration and passion as there is regimen. That’s how it all gels together.

The exhibition, which opened to the public on July 5, was stalled for almost seven months by the pandemic after a private opening tea for five people on Nov. 14. It features nearly 100 abstract paintings, drawings, ceramics, digital prints and mixed-media works produced between 1968 and 2020. The surprises in this handsomely laid-out exhibition include Shannon Will's earliest clay sculptures, which bear little resemblance to the precise and better-known geometric forms that followed. 

Hand built, brightly painted with automotive paints and displayed in two long cases outside the main exhibition, they take viewers into a strange world of botanical and marine-like organisms. The theme of these works seems to pertain to transformation or the process of morphing, something the artist has continued to do in her own inimitable way. Fortunately, as part of the exhibition, a long overdue catalogue is in the works. ■  

Mary Shannon Will: People, Places and Things at the Nickle Galleries in Calgary from July 5 to Oct. 10, 2021.

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Nickle Galleries

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