Sandra Sawatzky

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Sandra Sawatzky, “Debt” (detail), 2021, embroidery, wool and silk on linen (photo by John Dean)

Although her practice consists of long days of slow, meticulous toil with output measured in years, even near-decades, Calgary artist Sandra Sawatzky is ultimately most concerned with the effects of acceleration.

What may sound like a contradiction makes sense when you consider the thematic context of her labours: a (very) big picture view of how exponential technological and economic growth, coupled with an insatiable and unsustainable demand for resources, has brought us to the precipice of, well, some very bad things.

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“Sandra Sawatzky: The Age of Uncertainty,” 2022, installation view, Nickle Galleries, Calgary (photo by Dave Brown, LCR Photo Services)

Picking up and expanding on the themes of her nine-years-in-the-making Black Gold Tapestry, a 220-foot chronological narrative about oil and its impact on humanity, Sawatzky’s The Age of Uncertainty – on view at Nickle Galleries in Calgary until April 9 – is somewhat more modest in scale. This time, it took a mere four years to produce a dozen 54-inch by 42-inch linen panels hand embroidered with various existential bugbears of our times.  

Just as Sawatzky drew inspiration from the Bayeux Tapestry for her previous project, she once again turns to a medieval source as a model: the Labours of the Months, a kind of calendar in illuminated manuscript format found in a Christian devotional tome called the Book of Hours, which was popular in the late Middle Ages.

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Sandra Sawatzky, “Debt,” 2021, embroidery, wool and silk on linen, 42” x 54” (photo by John Dean)

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Sandra Sawatzky, “Resource Scarcity,” 2021, embroidery, wool and silk on linen, 42” x 54” (photo by John Dean)

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Whereas the Labours of the Months typically depicted agrarian concerns pertaining to seasonal cycles – ploughing, sowing, threshing, harvesting, etc. – each panel in The Age of Uncertainty is devoted to things that collectively worry us: nuclear weapons, conventional warfare, surveillance, corruption, debt, environmental destruction and the like. Each panel is anchored around a quote from such disparate sources as former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre.

“In 2018, when I started this project, I had to figure out what kind of subject matter I would address, and I started off by looking at what millennials were concerned about in their future,” says Sawatzky. “There was a survey done in 2018 – before COVID – of, I think, 18- to 25-year-olds, and there were 10 things on that list. I used about eight of them and then added to it.”

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Sandra Sawatzky, “Inequality” (detail), 2021, embroidery, wool and silk on linen (photo by John Dean)

Talking to Sawatzky, you get a sense of the broad scope of curiosity that informs the project. Over the course of a brief interview, she conversationally hop-scotches from her memories of the 1969 Apollo moon landing to her thoughts on plans to extract resources from asteroids and from the perils of instant gratification vis-à-vis Amazon and iPhones to tracing the development of computers back to the invention of the Jacquard loom in 1804.

The Age of Uncertainty abounds with many of these kinds of narrative threads. You’ll find Vladimir Putin, a Canaanite god of child sacrifice, and a current-day Last Supper where the disciples brandish smart phones. Also: business-class cannibals, contemporary plague doctors and Donald Trump.

“I like symbolism,” says Sawatzky. “For me, it is kind of like a private language, but people usually seem to catch on to what’s going on and understand what I’m saying.”

While the centre portion of each panel is reserved for human folly, nature gets its revenge in the marginalia, where threatened white rhinos and belugas take up arms against their bipedal antagonists. Yet for all the portending doom of The Age of Uncertainty, there’s plenty of laugh-out-loud humor, too. All of it, the tragedy and the comedy alike, serve to drive the underlying message: we’re about to spin off the fast track, so perhaps it’s time to think about decelerating.

"We have to be really good at being good neighbours to each other all the way around the world, because all of us depend on each other to behave ourselves,” says Sawatzky. “And we're not behaving ourselves.” ■

Sandra Sawatzky: The Age of Uncertainty at Nickle Galleries in Calgary from Jan. 17 until April 9, 2022.

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