From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents a new look at Canadian artist Emily Carr (1871 - 1945) and her encounters with the indigenous peoples of northwest Canada. Described by Georgia O’Keefe as a ‘darling of the women’s movement’, Carr is one of Canada’s best-loved artists and authors, though she achieved recognition late in life.
This unusual exhibition is Carr’s first retrospective in Europe. It is also a refreshing look at modern painting and the representation of the indigenous populations of British Columbia by a female artist, a topic Carr first became fascinated with following a trip to Alaska in 1907.
From Europe to Canada
Having become acquainted with the European avant-garde while in France and London (including the Fauves and the Scottish Colourists), Carr transformed the establishment’s appropriation of the ‘Primitive’ and weaved it into an honest engagement with Canada’s First People. Her landscapes depicting ancestral homelands often contained totemic artifacts, cultural products of societies under threat, some samples of which will be on show at Dulwich. Exuberantly coloured with strong, expressive brush marks, her large landscapes mix a kind of Romanticism familiar from the surreal abstraction of Graham Sutherland or the symbolic intensity of Paul Nash, with Canadian topography. There is also an abiding influence from Canada’s Group of Seven, a twentieth century nationalist art group that sought to promote the character of the Canadian land and its people.
Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition
This is an elaborately crafted show, interpreting Carr’s visionary journey through the forests of British Columbia. Moving from darkness toward light and ending with euphoric seascapes and skies, look out for Carr’s rarely seen compositional sketches that bind the exhibition together, and her ethnographic writings on the cultures and rituals she encountered and admired so much.