Patel brown EAST | 184 Munro St.

Laura Dawe | Scrapartment

January 15 - April 16 2022

The fragments, cut-outs, and notions that are pasted, stuck, and sewn into a scrapbook are mere debris without their maker, and yet utterly profound, if only to that creator herself.  The act of bringing such an object together highlights what sociologist Ros Walling-Wefelmeyer calls “the contingency and partiality of the scraps themselves and of its own activity in giving them form.” The scrapbooker makes sense of the ephemeral nature of both the mundane and the exotic pieces of life by their act of saving, sorting, and sharing vestiges from it, and in so doing, performs both a practical and conceptual approach to knowing their world.   

Laura Dawe’s work explodes from the covers of the traditional scrapbook Walling-Wefelmeyer discusses and brings this methodological approach of meaning making into the entirety of the gallery. In her Scrapartment we step into the pages of a living scrapbook, one that exudes extreme nostalgia, a simultaneity of bliss and anxiety, a calmness and compulsion. Dawe has spent hours upon hours gathering, compiling, and reinventing snippets salvaged from other art projects, objects found in the street and flea market bric-a-brac into a fully coordinated, provisional, work-from-home-in-progress.  

Dawe’s drive to make is utterly palpable: her handwork is obvious in the rips, threads and folds that make up this dwelling space, her brushstrokes and markings cover almost every surface. Portraits of friends are treated like paper dolls, raw canvas and bed sheets are refashioned into ruffled valances and rag rugs, dried blossoms and cigarette butts are turned to potpourri. Floral motifs in shades of mauve, wine and lavender, with their petals gathered loosely around one another, are the most pervasive pattern here, repeated over and over in various stages of budding, blooming, dying. 

Ripped initially from the pages of the Laura Ashley Book of Home Decorating, the pieces of Dawe’s collection have accumulated in magnitude and scale during the pandemic, to the point where domestic space has become the pages for its accrual. Here, the scrapbook is no longer a place for her to make sense of life, but rather life provides her the stuff from which it can be remade by giving form to the contingent nature of comfort, catharsis, and constraint.

- Text by Rhiannon Vogl