TRANSPLANT negotiates themes of mobilities, of people, animals, plants, ideas and things. Within the context of the media environment, the work dissects notions of ‘transplant’ as a means of understanding current global issues.

To transplant is to move or transfer somebody or something to a different place or environment. This usually requires some effort or upheaval. Displace, remove, relocate, take, uproot, implant. This work pulls from current and historical sites of conflict and debate, touching on issues of migration, identity, myth and medicine. Somebody takes immense risks to be in a better place, to escape war and famine, poverty and oppression. Someone waiting for a functioning organ, risks the odds of surviving until a donor is found and then a precarious existence of transplant rejection. New gene editing tools fuel ethical debates as technology supersedes knowledge and understanding of potential outcomes. Logie’s is not an objective inquiry. Rather, it registers between the political and the personal, the scientific and the poetic. It represents more an embodied knowledge drawing upon associated memories, stories and perceptions, which impact our shared experience and how we live together.

The works, Scattering Plot: A Temple, Following a long line and Trestle, examine movements of people and the broader social and cultural Implications of these movements.

Scattering Plot: A Temple

Kodalith images, brass shim, linen thread, grommets, aluminum tent poles

A scatter plot is a type of mathematical diagram using coordinates to display data and possible correlations. The notion of ‘scattering plot’ suggests something more attuned to literature, a narrative device to open up a storyline or write an alternative scenario. This photo-based work is made up of retractable aluminium tent poles suspending over 100 4x5 inch high contrast Kodalith images in the structure of a mobile. One tent pole is shaped as the peak of a tent or temple, bisected by another.

The images portray women and children in the upheaval and conflict of forced movements. The small translucent fragments of faces and hands, gestures and glances, engage with a narrative of change and suffering. Working with these long kept images, Logie looks for ways to understand the social and historical processes that dictates how we treat one another.

Within systems of categorization that migrants and refugees are subjected to, each person, each image, becomes as cell of information or data. What would be standardized symbols of processing and flowcharting, Logie randomly places, cuts out of the materials or loosely renders with thread. Instead of a labelling, these markings function as a means of claiming individuality, of giving presence. They face us, interact, turn away.

Following a long line

Stonehenge paper, black gesso, linen tape, thread, graphite, pins

Following a long line is composed of three mural-sized drawings on black coated Stonehenge paper, hung edge-to-edge. The images are in two parts. Large black and white portrait-like faces dominate the upper halves, drawn partly from photographs of the women of Logie’s matrilineal ancestry. These personalized faces are transplanted over outlines of historical and cultural references – the statue of Demeter, a Victorian figurine, and a late Neolithic stone female idol. Each drawing, made up of four vertical segments, is pinned and stitched together with red and black thread. Stories Logie’s grandmother dictated to her mother are printed in graphite over lower segments of each drawing. One story tells of Logie’s great great grandmother, a Romani traveller living in the midlands of England in the mid 19^th Century. Logie’s maternal grandparents left England in what is referred to as the third wave of immigration to Canada between 1890 and 1920. Logie acknowledges her family as immigrants, stemming from a long line of settlers occupying First Nations unceded territories in what is now called Canada. We took, uprooted, displaced.

Partly created in the mid 1990s, these drawings were cut and layered with other materials into a sculptural installation. Editing and reworking is an ongoing process for Logie, an act of recycling and a means of bringing relevant imagery back into her present practice.

Trestle

Vintage Chinese shadowbox, toy train track, wood frame, mirror plexiglass, text

The main feature of this small wall hanging sculpture is a vintage Chinese glass shadowbox, a diorama of a classic pagoda garden intricately carved in cork. Suspended upside down, the lacquered base becomes part of a bridge, the gap spanned by a piece of toy train track. Reflected in a supporting mirror, the track carries on into the void. Text written on the glass tells the story of the thousands of Chinese migrants recruited, often by forced movements, to work on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The ship journey was arduous as were the subsequent working conditions. Landing in the artist’s hometown of Port Moody between 1880 and 1885, many succumbed to Beriberi disease. Buried on the hillside overlooking the town, their bodies were later exhumed and returned to their homeland for a proper burial.

Fae Logie

Fae Logie