Your story and mine: very short poems with woodcuts

Libby Hague, Insomnia, 2017, woodcut type, woodcut, copper, acrylic on paper, 21” x 16.5”.


Project Space
Your story and mine: very short poems with woodcuts
Libby Hague
February 15, 2018 – March 17, 2018

Very short “poems” are printed in wood type and accompanied by abstract or figurative woodcuts. Throughout her life, artist Libby Hague (RCA, BFA Honors, Concordia University) has loved to read (and being read to) as much as she has loved making things. As a child, Hague had a large, green, illustrated volume of The Golden Treasury of Poetry edited by Louis Untermeyer. This wonderful book, one of only a few that belonged to her, and, therefore, one she constantly read and quickly memorized, included “Tiger, tiger burning bright, in the forest of the night…” It was ferocious, lustrous, concise, rhythmic, insightful and perfect. Those qualities in writing still thrill Hague. Hague has grown up finding freedom as an artist and discomfort writing. With Your story and mine, however, it is as if she has taken her sharpest X-Acto knife and carefully slipped some phrases from their original pages (including her own writing) and then given them an image or a sculpture to keep them company. Together, she is calling them poems. Libby Hague’s work examines humane and complex social relationships in our precarious and interconnected world. Her curiosity and love of invention led her to a hybrid practice of printmaking and installation. Her solo exhibitions include The Past is Never Over: A Retrospective, Art Gallery of Mississauga (Mississauga, ON); Inventing Hope, Idea Exchange (Cambridge, ON); Walk with me, Centre Clark, (Montreal, QC); Sympathetic Connections, Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, ON); Be Brave! We are in this together, YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto, ON). Group exhibitions include Habitat, Harbourfront Centre (Toronto, ON) and Kelowna Art Gallery (Kelowna, BC); Build…build better, Zion Schoolhouse (Toronto); and All that glows, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax, NS).