Maura Doyle: Castor Craftsmanship
Maura Doyle Excerpt from A Guide to Beaver Architecture 2009
The imitation of nature is a longtime tradition in art from Breugel to Bateman. But Toronto artist Maura Doyle has a rather different approach to the question of nature’s role in art. Rather than representing animals and landscapes, she repositions animals and landscapes as creative entities in their own right. The approach is often tongue-in-cheek and full of humour. But it gives one pause at the same time.
Doyle’s 2005 boulder projects in Toronto and Vancouver, for instance, installed large glacial erratics as public sculptures—ones created by ice and geological forces, and simply placed-and-plaqued by her.
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Maura Doyle “New Age Beaver” 2009 Exhibition view |
Now Doyle’s “New Age Beaver” exhibition at Toronto’s Paul Petro Contemporary Art does something similar for our national icon Castor canadensis. Rather than taking photos or making paintings of beavers, Doyle recreates examples of beaver-hewn “sculpture” and “architecture” originally documented in wildlife biologists’ research reports. Doyle has also produced a publication, A Guide to Beaver Architecture: Sticks and Mud Reconsidered, that “documents the history of beaver architecture as recorded by the human animal”—including a pink T-shirt dam in Haliburton and a coal dam in North Dakota.
Doyle’s practice may seem silly at first glance, but her levity provides entry points into serious philosophical debates around nature and culture. (980 Queen St W, Toronto ON)
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Maura Doyle Beaver Sampler 2009 |
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