Laurel Rennie

Laurel Rennie works with materials as an alchemist would. In her hands, textiles, wood, plants, and their colour-making potential become stories to tell, worlds to shape. The motifs, hues, and textures in the fabrics that she finds, dyes, and pieces together offer an abstract form of narration; her wood sculptures with rounded contours trace paths of sinuous speculation. Guided by the curiosities that she observes in the natural world, Rennie investigates folklore, superstitions, and netherworlds. She pays particular attention to other-than-human intelligence and to modes of knowledge that are non-scientific, sensory, and intuitive.

As winter departed, Rennie wanted to capture the sensation of springtime, and so during her residency she concentrated on what was about to emerge. Fascinated by overlapping stories and intersecting cycles, she explored scientific discourses about the advent of an extraordinary event: the simultaneous emergence of two types of periodical cicadas from more than ten years of subterranean dormancy. Underground, these magicicadas maintain a symbiotic relationship with trees, drinking their sap through their roots. Above ground, their cycles overlap only every 221 years. Rennie discerned in this convergence the idea of mysterious prophets showing themselves in the light of day. She tried to understand what these portents might want to tell us, in the belief that their presence awakens in us a state of corporeal perception leading to a sense of amazement.

In her studio this quest took the form of an installation for which she dyed bits of cloth with dandelions, burdock, juniper berries, and indigo, assembled them into quilts, and sculpted cicadas out of wood and taproots, which she hung to create a series of divinatory pendulums. The transformation of these natural materials into magical poetic shapes invited a reflection on the cycles of life, death, and spiritual survival. Beyond physical death, species extinction, and even the end of the world as we know it, Rennie hopes, the spirits of different beings will live on through the entanglement of their stories with those of other entities.