‘Without trees, we’re toast,” asserts Lorraine Roy.
Trees feed us, provide the world with clean air, shelter us from the hot sun, and give us many raw materials with which to enrich our lives.
Roy is an award-winning Ontario textile artist whose main subject matter is trees. On Monday, Sept. 17, she will be in Comox to present Call of the Heartwood: My Creative Journey with Trees. In the slideshow and talk she will tell how trees wove themselves into her art and her heart.
Born and raised in a French Canadian community in rural southwestern Ontario, Roy grew to love the trees – the weeping willows, the Lombardy poplars, the mulberries and maples on the banks of the river Thames. But she also loved learning to work and play with fabrics at her mother’s knee.
She got a degree in horticulture and worked in the industry for about 10 years. But she also pursued her love of needlework. For the last 30 years, she has made her living as a professional artist. Her medium is fabric and fibres and her tool is a second hand $400 industrial Bernina. With it, she has created hundreds of works, including many special commissions.
Roy will also talk about her latest work, Woven Woods, which is currently on tour around Canada. It is a series of 12 mandala-like pieces based on her studies of the secret life of trees.
Scientific research has shown there’s a real chatter going on underneath the soil as tree roots communicate through a vast network of fungi. Each circular piece of this art series encloses the story of a thriving ecosystem, where all individual elements contribute to support the whole.
To celebrate all things treed, community artists in various mediums have been invited to take along their tree-inspired works to put on display alongside Roy’s work.
Roy’s presentation will be at The Little Red Church, 2182 Comox Ave, Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10. The event is open to the public, and tickets may be available at the door.
But to reserve yours, contact Trudy Thorne totrude@gmail.comtotrude@gmail.com or call 250-339-6423; or Ardythe Crawford at ardythec@telus.netardythec@telus.net or call 250-336-8140.
More information about Roy can be found at www.lroyart.comwww.lroyart.com.