Staging Homes

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Gillian Willans, "Symphony in White," 2018 (left) and "Sleeping Beauty," 2018 (right)

each acrylic and oil on canvas, 32" x 24”

“During the toughest times, I painted to make sure I was still visible to myself.” – Gillian Willans

The Bible sets it out plainly in Proverbs 31:27 – a woman “looks well to the way of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.” Such advice has kept generations of women scurrying through their days. Edmonton artist Gillian Willans, who has three young children, says she hasn’t slept properly in four years. A prolific artist represented by the Scott Gallery, she won this year’s $10,000 Eldon and Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize. She also teaches on contract at both the University of Alberta and MacEwan University.

Homemaking didn’t come naturally to Willans. After the exhilaration of a creative career that allowed the freedom to make popcorn for dinner whenever she wanted, the archetype of the perfect mother was unfamiliar. The banal routines of homemaking ground her down, yet also fascinated her. She began to reflect on gender-role ideals and how they play out in intimate domestic spaces. Then, in quiet moments, she retreated to her home studio and worked on the paintings that would become The Well Tended Garden, a solo show on view until Aug. 19 in the McMullen Gallery at the University of Alberta Hospital.

Willans' meticulous diptychs and triptychs of domestic interiors are eerily devoid of inhabitants, yet alive with a sense of presence. Sourced from photographs in second-hand stores, vintage catalogues and the provincial archives, they have a timeless quality. The 17th-century Dutch genre paintings that inspired them reveal domestic spaces maintained by a ceaseless drive to cleanliness and order. But the anchoring of socio-economic status through an immaculate home is as true of Pinterest and Instagram as it was of Vermeer.

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Gillian Willans, "Untitled (Un Made Bed)," 2018 (left) and "Untitled (Ready Made Bed)," 2018 (right)

each acrylic and oil on canvas, 32" x 32”

The haunting quality of the paintings – they are like stage sets awaiting a cast of actors – suggests deeper sociological aspects raised by Henri Lefebvre, a 20th-century Marxist philosopher who influenced Willans. His Critique of Everyday Life postulates that major social forces – like consumerism – play out in the midst of everyday tedium. After all, the home is a driver of consumer spending, with some studies suggesting that women purchase up to 80 per cent of consumer goods.

Willans’ paintings almost always feature empty chairs or beds that beckon the viewer to enter. But there’s no script for these middle-class settings. We, as viewers, choose how we play the parts in the drama of everyday life. Our choices add a new twist to Lefebvre’s ideas: the hands that rock the cradle and wipe the counters also make the choices that shape our consumerist world. ■

The Well Tended Garden is on view in the McMullen Gallery at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton from June 30 to Aug. 19, 2018.