The Black Gold Tapestry is a 67-metre history of fossil fuel extraction created by Calgary artist Sandra Sawatzky. This area is depicting technology, mass production and oil.Don Lee/Supplied
For the last decade, Calgary artist Sandra Sawatzky has been busy with her needle, not embroidering flowers or birds but oil wells and nuclear warheads. Inspired by a show of pioneer embroidery at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and historic tapestries and manuscript illumination, the artist’s surprising work applies an old feminine craft to highly contemporary projects.
Based on the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Battle of Hastings of 1066, The Black Gold Tapestry is a 67-metre history of fossil fuel extraction, from the ancients’ use of bitumen to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Originally unveiled in 2017 at the Glenbow, it continues to draw intrigued viewers as it tours group shows in the United States. Meanwhile, The Age of Uncertainty, a 2022 work inspired by medieval devotional books, covers the things that keep us awake at night, and is now showing at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery.
How did you first get into embroidery?
The Black Gold Tapestry by artist Sandra Sawatzky. This part of the artwork is depicting Robert Goddard inventing the rocket.Don Lee/Supplied
I went to a show at the Glenbow in 2007 with my daughter, a show of pioneer women and children’s embroidery, and it was really beautiful. I had only done a little embroidery when I was 16, but I had made lots of clothes and I do a lot of handiwork on them, so I was really good at making a uniform stitch. At the show, they had an activity room for kids and parents, and my daughter and her friend and I went in there and embroidered for three hours. I was immediately engaged by it. I was looking for ideas for Christmas presents, so I embroidered some of these drawings I’ve been doing. The figurative part was like a relief; it stood out from the fabric and the colours were beautiful.
I was making films at the time. I’d always envisioned doing something like an epic film, but in Canada, there’s no budget for epic films. I thought about the Bayeux Tapestry. Some people call it the earliest animated film, and when I made my tapestry, I called it a film on cloth.
I riffed off the idea of the tapestry about the Battle of Hastings: It was an event that led to many other things and I thought: ‘What’s our Battle of Hastings?’ and eventually settled upon the story of oil.
How did Albertans react?
The Black Gold Tapestry by artist Sandra Sawatzky. This particular area of the work is depicting bitumen and brick Mesopotamia.Don Lee/Supplied
I live in this province and I know people who are in the oil and gas world as well as lots of environmentalists. I got a lot of positive feedback from both groups.
Most of the time when we talk about oil and gas, it becomes quite a technical story or a financial story or the political story, but I was trying to show how people have utilized it. I wanted to look at the human story, look at how did we get here.
It was all about using oil, gas and coal for human needs or inventions; it was a catalyst for all sorts of invention, good and bad. I wanted it to be multicultural, to go around the world and show also how old it was.
I wanted people to engage with a big story but also engage with handicraft: Coloured threads are so beautiful, and the ones I used were a woollen silk, and the blend is such a rich thread colour. There’s a sheen to them.
For some people, myself, for example, that kind of work would be tedious. How do you experience it?
The Black Gold Tapestry by artist Sandra Sawatzky. This area is depicting the Chinese inventing the spring pole drill.Don Lee/Supplied
I never found it tedious, hard because when I was doing the tapestry, for Canada’s 150th anniversary, I was working nine and half hours a day stitching in order to complete it. I could listen to things. I could talk on the phone while I was stitching or sometimes enjoy doing it quietly. Every time I start a new panel, it was a new colour palette, so that created novelty. As I went along, I got tired of certain types of stitches, but I still had to use the same Bayeux Tapestry stitches, so I found new ways of using them in different patterns.
How did you choose the topics featured in the Age of Uncertainty
I’ve always loved the Book of Hours, those hand-painted books of prayer and with the labours of the months and these beautiful illustrations. What if it started with what young people are worried about in this day and age? So I did a fair amount of investigation and came up with 12 panels, some as old as mankind and some fairly new, certainly helped by technology and oil and gas: climate change, war, nuclear threats, income inequality, debt, work, corruption, surveillance, AI, overpopulation, resource scarcity, and science and technology.
The Age of Uncertainty features 12 embroidered panels showing the anxieties of the age, created by artist Sandra Sawatzky during the pandemic. This panel is depicting climate.John Dean/Supplied
It took me about a year and a half to do the drawings, because I always start off with the master drawings and then I started embroidery. I got a Canada Council grant.
It was two days before the whole shut down during COVID that I found out about the funding. So it was a very good project. I didn’t need other people around and working with your hands is a way to calm your mind too.
I looked for quotes that would be a springboard for illustration, for humour. Just like in the tapestry, there are borders and marginalia, and in the margins are drolleries, which are something that you would see in an illuminated manuscript, a way to poke fun at the human story. And at the same time talk about some serious things.
The Age of Uncertainty by artist Sandra Sawatzky. This panel is depicting debt.John Dean/Supplied
Can you give me an example?
Around population, I have a rabbit that represents incredible fertility. We often see images of a man carrying a bunch of dead animals over his shoulder. So, the rabbit is carrying three dead bodies over its shoulder. We just don’t even think about how cruel we are.
What are you working on now?
I am working on Back to the Garden, an ‘altarpiece to nature’ that spans 23 feet [seven metres] across. The combined text and imagery are a rumination on the living world – how it is mysterious, beautiful, dangerous, wondrous, profound, vast, multidimensional.
Rather than examine what we humans have accomplished, I observe what we have not. The beauty of nature is that when we take humanity’s tinkering out of the picture nature is a self-cleaning oven – able to take care of itself.
The Age of Uncertainty is showing at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery to March 8. The Black Gold Tapestry will be included in the Threads of Change exhibition at the Museum of Design Atlanta, from Feb. 6 to May 11.
This interview has been edited and condensed.