Wendy Trusler
Dancing In A Northern Kitchen Chapter 13
Wendy Trusler is Canadian-based interdisciplinary visual artist, designer, curator and writer who creates site-responsive installations that incorporate drawing, painting, text, sculpture, performance, photography and film. She is an Associate of the Ontario College of Art and holds a B.A. in History from the University of Western Ontario.
Much of Trusler’s work examines the roles that symbol and language play in coding memory, and the ways in which recollections are organized into what we understand as history. Shaped by the experience of having lived in isolation in wild places, ideas around ecology, continuity and regeneration play out in her material choices and the physicality of her work, as well as how it brings people together.
“ ‘Dancing in a Northern Kitchen’ was inspired by many seasons spent cooking for tree-planters in remote areas of Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. Using the accordion bookwork form, I set out to examine the connections between cooking, art, and dance. I also wanted to honor the layers of experience that are folded into the pages of a cookbook to suggest that time, place, and people are as integral to recipes and good cooking as ingredients. In each piece, recipes and menu plans, dance steps, images and photographs are organized in chapters and layered in encaustic wax to bring to mind stories, reminiscences and rhythms of the everyday. “
Dancing In a Northern Kitchen was produced between 1995 and 2003 making up Six/Seventeen Mixed media Bookworks employing encaustics, oil stick, dry pigment, photographs and paper on hinged mahogany-ply panels backed with burlap and leather. Her works left as imprints to rekindle what can be a smell, a taste, a time and place.
Trusler exhibits in contexts ranging from public and private galleries to interventions in storefront windows, industrial spaces, and parks. Recent projects include The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning (2015 & 2013); Collective Vision, an on-going curatorial project in the Mental Health Services Department of the Peterborough Regional Health Centre, Canada, and Voices at Hand, an archival-oriented performance piece that has been mounted in venues across Ontario and reached audiences in 26 countries. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, was shortlisted for the Taste Canada Food Writing Awards for Best Culinary Narrative in 2014 and awarded a Chalmers Art Fellowship in 2015. She currently works as the Public Art Facilitator for the City of Peterborough.
