WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND

×

1 of 6

Expand

"Doll House"

Heather Benning, "Doll House," installation view, 2008. All photos, Heather Benning.

×

2 of 6

Expand

"Doll House"

Heather Benning, "Doll House," installation view, 2008.

×

3 of 6

Expand

"Doll House"

Heather Benning, "Doll House," installation view, 2008. All photos, Heather Benning.

×

4 of 6

Expand

"Field Doll"

Heather Benning, "Field Doll," installation view, 2009.

×

5 of 6

Expand

"Field Doll"

Heather Benning, "Field Doll," installation view, 2009.

×

6 of 6

Expand

"Field Doll"

Heather Benning, "Field Doll," installation view, 2009

Prev

Next

WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND

After a series of startling large-scale installations, Heather Benning's new work just looks like child's play.

BY: Andrew Markle

A few kilometres from Sinclair, Manitoba, just off Highway 2, an abandoned farmhouse stands alone in an open sea of grassland, a marker that says, We were once here. On this flat landscape, the house looms out of the ground like a skyscraper, and the only sign of life is from the occasional trucker driving by or the steady chunking of oil derricks pumping with mechanical regularity, day and night, in the surrounding fields.

On closer inspection, there’s something different about this house. The family that lived in this house left in 1968, but the house and the furniture inside seem unaffected by time — a Formica and chrome kitchen table, a plastic chandelier, ice skates under the stairs, the plastic arms of a wall clock resting at 9:03. One side of the house has been cut off and replaced with Plexiglas so you can look in and see the 50s furniture, the pink, green, and yellow pastel coloured walls inside.

In 2008, Heather Benning turned this abandoned farmhouse into a life-sized dollhouse. She spent two summers doing the work — cleaning up the rubble, re-plastering the walls, painting the rooms, buying and setting up the retro furniture. It was part of her project as artist in residence for the town of Redvers, Saskatchewan. “I’ve worked on and off for a restoration company,” she says, “and I knew the tricks of the trade. But basically I just went to work everyday and if I only got part of a wall done then that’s all I got. Big projects have never really scared me.”

Benning’s most recent big project is part of an exhibition this summer at the Sherwood Village Gallery branch of Regina’s Dunlop Art Gallery — Field Doll, a 12-foot doll sculpture. Benning photographed the doll lying in a blanket of snow in an abandoned farmyard on the frozen prairie landscape, like it was dropped by a child as the family station wagon pulled away from the farm for the last time. Like Dollhouse, the setting plays an important role in the work — a gutted barn looms in the background, stripped of its paint, its windows and doors.

Benning grew up on a farm, and when she was still young her parents had to choose to either grow their operation, or abandon farming altogether. “We left farming in the early 90s,” she says. “There were a lot of people at the same time, children that I grew up with, whose families had also chosen to leave. You can drive down any road and within a few miles you’ll see another abandoned yard, and these skeletons left behind all have their own story.”

The 12-foot doll is angel-faced, but its massive bulk and obvious abandonment speaks of something sinister. “I wanted to make this doll really giant,” Benning says. “I wanted viewers to feel intimidated by it and a little freaked out when they saw it. I wanted it to look really cute, but when you look at it longer, it’s kind of disturbing.” When it’s installed, she wants the sculpture to crowd the gallery floor so viewers have to step over it. An upturned tricycle in the corner, one of its wheels turning, is meant to exaggerate the size of the doll and add to the overpowering sense that something is wrong.

“I think whatever happens to us in our childhood shapes us for our future,” Benning says. “Whenever you see a doll left on the side of the road, or in a back alley, you have this idea that something sinister may have happened to the child who owned it.”

She adds that “dolls are little miniature notions of humans that children carry with them, they create fake souls for them. A lot of children who are attached to dolls use them to cope with all the negatives of life, so they don’t have to carry the negatives with them. I think as adults we all have that giant doll somewhere with all of our fears and troubles.”

Field Doll is a replica of a doll Benning had when she was growing up. “I would bring it with me wherever I travelled and it would be my significant idea of home,” she says. She grew up near Humboldt, Saskatchewan, but travelled to England and northern Saskatchewan before attending the University of Regina. A year and half into her BFA, she was accepted into the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she finished her degree in sculpture. “I think I always wanted to make art,” she says. “My grandmother was a schoolteacher and a hobby painter, and I think maybe, in a different life, or a different world, or time, she probably would have gone into the arts. So I was always encouraged by her.”

After completing her BFA, Benning received a grant from Imperial Tobacco and used that money to build The Marysburg Project: Watching Woman outside Humboldt, which she describes as “a giant plaster woman, built in the confinements of an abandoned one-and-a-half-story house.” The work was about prairie women of the early 1900s, how they were consumed by their homes, and how their homes consumed them. Then, betweenMarysburg and Dollhouse, she worked on Downtime(exhibited at the AKA Gallery in Saskatoon in 2006, and the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon in 2007). The installation featured a pair of plaster cows staring at TV screens, a piece that commented on the closure of U.S. borders to Canadian cattle. Currently, Benning is at the Edinburgh College of Art finishing an MFA in sculpture.

She continues to think about the themes of displacement and loss that work their way into her art. “Saskatchewan is probably the place that I’ll always miss whenever I’m away,” she says. “I think it’s the weather, the dry climate, the fields. But it’s not necessarily the easiest place to live and work as an artist. There’s a lot of isolation.”

Field Doll is on May 29 to July 26, 2009 at Sherwood Village Gallery, Regina.