Erica Rutherford, The Reunion, Human Comey Series, 1997, oil on canvas, 144 x 154 cm, Collection of the Rutherford Family, Prince Edward Island. ©Estate of Erica Rutherford.
This exhibition presents an overview of the remarkable career of artist Erica Rutherford (1923-2008), who—in the last few decades of her life—made her home in rural Prince Edward Island. Following World War II, the artist became involved in theatre, design, visual art, and film. Constantly on the move, from London to South Africa–where she produced the country’s first film with a Black cast and spent several years farming—to Ibiza and other locales, Rutherford eventually settled on painting as a focus, although her work was conditioned by deep uncertainties about her identity. Adopting a crude, even regressive materiality in semi-abstract collages and paintings, Rutherford’s early work explored elemental subjective states. By the late 1960s, she was teaching in American art schools and had already shifted towards a hard-edged Pop style that became her trademark in the 1970s and 1980s.
Her life was transformed by her transition to living as a woman in the mid-1970s, and by her permanent move to Prince Edward Island, which she described as a homecoming, despite having first visited the Island in her forties. From the haunting and ambiguous imagery of her career up to this point, Rutherford settled into a cheerful domesticity reflected in brightly hued imagery of flowers, cats, landscapes, and a career in children’s illustration, only to return to nightmarish, elemental fantasies late in life, with the ambitious large-scale painting series The Human Comedy. Rutherford described her life as a “struggle to realize and to express my nature,” and in her autobiographical writing, she repeatedly noted the close relationship between her work as an artist and her self-realization—as a woman, as an explorer, and as a shaper of place and identity.
—Pan Wendt, curator
