By Roman Hayter
The artists responsible for the new exhibit, Caron Dubnick and Hilary Johnstone went on a week-long trip to Morning Lake in the summer of 2021 and began sketching. “We sketched every day, we’d do three to four sketches every day and then those sketches we both took home and started doing bigger artworks based on them all winter,” said Johnstone.
Johnstone spoke about the process of creating art while on the trip. “We just sketched in sketchbooks all day long. We’d just do different scenes that we saw. So that’s what we did for seven days straight just stopping really to eat or go for a swim,” Johnstone said. “I work with fabrics so there was no way I could do my work fabric work out there with a sewing machine and a ton of fabrics so I was just doing sketches and then I came back and I made them into big mockup drawings and then I would cut up my fabrics in and sort of do a collage based on that drawing.”
She explained the uniqueness that the show had using two different perspectives. “The interesting part of the show is really two things, one is that we put our sketches on the wall, tore them out of our sketchbooks and framed them and put them on the wall beside the big artwork that we did based on that sketch so you get to see the artist process, you get to see the sketch we did right on the spot and then you see the big artwork that we did later during the winter, you also get to see two artists viewpoints because Caron and I were side by side almost sitting on the deck of this cabin looking out over the lake and we drew completely different things and in completely different styles,” said Johnstone.
Johnstone’s next exhibit will take place at the Saskatchewan Craft Council in December of 2023 and will also focus on Morning Lake.
(Photo courtesy of Hilary Johnstone)