longing for home
Saskatchewan artist Heather Benning’s exhibition Field-Doll-House is mediation on place in an age of increasing mobility. It brings together elements from two of the artist’s projects over the last two decades. Field Doll features a 16 ft long sculpture of a doll modelled after Benning’s own childhood doll that accompanied the her on many of her own journeys. The sculpture is displayed along with a series of photographs that document the Field Doll’s journey over the last decade of being exhibited in multiple cities across the continent.
Along with the Field Doll we will be showing The Dollhouse, a video document of a work that the artist completed in the small Saskatchewan town of Redvers. For this project she completely restored the interior of a small farm house abandoned since the 1960’s. After replastering all the walls and shingling the roof she completely removed the north wall and replaced it with plexiglass so viewers could look into the house the way they would a child’s dollhouse. The rooms are painted in pastel hues and furnished with objects of a bygone era, that while for some will conjure a sense of the familiar, for others they remain remote.
Together Field-Doll-House speaks to our profound need for a sense of “home” and a deep desire for an authentic re-connection with place.
Heather Benning is a practicing artist whose work, rooted in the Canadian prairies, has been shown widely across North America and Europe. Benning Completed an MFA at the Edinburgh College of Art. She has been nominated for the Sobey’s Art Award, and received two London (UK) International Creative Competition Awards. Her work has been reviewed and featured by The Paris Review, Canadian Art Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, The Daily Mail, the CBC, amongst others. Bening has led workshops and lectured at Numerous Canadian and British universities and galleries, as well as at Cornell and Rhodes College in the United States. She is currently an educator, curator and adjudicator and is currently a program consultant with the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
