Another Life examines the challenges faced by women working in the construction trades, reflecting the Artist's own life experience. It explores the way the small everyday battles can lead to burnout, and more broadly, to gender disparity in the trades.
For Elise Lavallee Findlay, creating the sculptures is a process of transformation. If you pull one thread from a canvas, and then another and another, the canvas can break down, leaving it fragile, transparent, and not at all what it once was. For the artist, pulling apart a canvas thread by thread, in an act of slow and subtle violence, became a meditative reflection on how the small things can add up. This series displays how something once pulled apart can be made into something new, with its own strengths and purpose.
In this exhibition, the sculptures, which started as simple representations of past trauma, become art objects, whole and complete in and of themselves. They are an echo of the transformation that happens within ourselves when we work towards healing and become something new.
