In grade 10, my friend Anna and I approached our art teacher with an idea: we didn’t want to do the same art everyone else was doing. We were both in the “enriched” (i.e. over-achiever) stream academically and we also wanted to colour outside the box in our art class. Luckily, our teacher, Mrs. Lily Wallace, was game. We were officially enrolled for Art 10 but she gave us our own assignments and left us to get on with it. We worked at the back of the classroom (or, sometimes not in the classroom at all) while she taught the curriculum to the rest. It was one of the best examples of “you never know what you can get unless you ask.”
Our first task was to finish the stained glass panels that students from the first term had not completed. They were to be an installation in the “old wing” of the school so they needed a set number to cover all the window panes. Not only did I learn about how to do stained glasswork but also how to work with what I was given — there weren’t a lot of leftover glass supplies so where others had left gaps, we had to do our best to fill in, hoping it was within the original artist’s vision — to be fair, most were simple patterns of things like sailboats, flowers, and butterflies.
Our next task was to create a new silkscreen that was a copy of the original wallpaper in one of the rooms at Emily Carr House. We were given fragments of the original wallpaper for reference and Letraset transfers (or similar — they were lines and patterns instead of letters) to create the screens for each colour. The finished silkscreen was used to print new paper that was hung in the restored room that you can visit today. Anna and I were each given an 11 x 17 framed portion of that wallpaper.
The third major task (and really, I think that was all we had time for in the term) took us out of the classroom and into the workshop with Carole Sabistion where we joined other students from the school district for a collaborative project in conjunction with Expo 86 (Islands 86 — which was intended to cash in on the excitement happening in Vancouver that year). The resulting fabric art collage now hangs in Victoria City Hall — you can see it when you enter from Centennial Square; here’s how it looks from the stairwell:
The lighter blue panel that runs diagonally top to bottom with a broken island group is the one I contributed to the piece. I smile every time I see this piece. It really was an honour to work with Carole Sabistion — I love her work and she was very open and encouraging; not everyone would be willing to work with a handful of teens, even dorky over-achievers like us.
So, out of the deal, Anna and I were treated as peers and given a view into the work that real artists do — no pinch pots and pastel sketches — and all of our resulting work from that year is on display, even now, some 25+ years later. In return, we broke Mrs. Wallace’s heart. In June of that year, she drove us up to the senior high school to personally introduce us to the art teacher there. Sadly, neither of us had enrolled in Art 11 and were not planning to; Anna wanted to focus on academics and I had decided that getting graded for art was for suckers.
We still got A’s for Art 10. Thanks, Mrs. Wallace.