RADIANCE

Rosemary Burd is a Vancouver artist who found her artistic voice during the pandemic. Rosemary had been making her shaky photos for years when a call for art prompted her to combine that practice with the simple running stitch she was using in her Japanese sashiko embroidery. This experimentation led to her first group show,

Toronto’s Propeller Gallery’s 2021 Contact Photography Festival Virtual Exhibition, Altered Images by Hand. Since then, Rosemary’s photo-based work has been exhibited in numerous group shows in BC, and at the Exposure Photography Festival in Calgary, AB. This is her first solo show. It will be followed by a three-artist show at POMO Arts, Port Moody, BC in the fall. Rosemary is self-taught in both photography and embroidery.

Artist Statement

There is a certain quality of light - dappled, shifting sunlight, filtering through leaves and branches - that makes me stop still when I am walking in our coastal forests. The Japanese term for this is Komorebi (木漏れ日), meaning ‘sunlight leaking through trees’. But komorebi describes more than a phenomenon of light. It encompasses the beauty of the everyday, an awareness of fleeting moments, and feelings of nostalgia and quiet contemplation. I feel all of that bound up in these embroidered photographs of Denman Island, a landscape that I have loved, as my mother had, since childhood.

My shaky photos, hand embroidered with luminous silk thread, are my attempt at capturing this constantly shifting light. I use intentional camera movement (ICM) to create my photographs, shaking my iPhone to transform sunlight into streaks of colour. The wildly erratic motion of my iPhone is countered with the calm, precise, movement of my hand-stitching. I feel as if I am suspending time as I embroider: the photographic image might represent a fraction of a second, but the embroidery represents hours of work as I amplify the striations of light, stitch by stitch. Through this process, often unremarkable scenes are imbued with a radiant beauty that is truer to my experience in that moment than to the landscape itself.