Bonnie Baxter looks across the table at me with a twinkle in her eye. Her cropped hair, which she\u2019s recently dyed highlighter yellow, adds to her playful air. The brightly patterned blanket she\u2019s thrown over her shoulders to keep warm in the studio fits effortlessly with her leopard-print leggings. With her socks and Birkenstocks, there\u2019s no one cooler than the queen of cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The walls of the studio in Val-David are covered in a constellation of drawings, cutouts, maps, markings, charts, and other ephemera from various projects dating back to the 1980s. \u201cI have a visual memory; if it\u2019s not out in the open it doesn\u2019t exist,\u201d she tells me, referring to her constant process of labouring over the next project and revisiting the past to make anew. Traces of previous worlds appear throughout the space. Tacked to the wall or freestanding, these objects are like characters in a play, waiting to deliver their lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each piece has a story\u200a\u2014\u200aor even, I would argue, an identity. \u201cAll my work has to do with what I\u2019m living,\u201d Bonnie observes about these interwoven universes. \u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily autobiographical, but it\u2019s about what I\u2019m going through at that moment.\u201d From where I sit, I see a larger-than-life rodent-humanoid from the Ratkind <\/em>series(2018\u200a\u201319); an ethereal-looking test strip from the immersive video installation Spirit Matter<\/em> (2019); and a photographic printout of the iconic blonde, wig-wearing silhouette of the protagonist in Jane\u2019s Journey<\/em> (2008), a self-described para-autobiography, fairy tale, and travel-scape occurring across various eerie landscapes. What stands out about these works, in addition to their striking visual composition, is their lingering affect. Each one evokes a unique feeling, a holistic mood, a colour that inhabits the soul long after the experience is over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Bonnie-Baxter\"$
Bonnie Baxter<\/strong>
Spirit Matter<\/em>, installation view, Centre CLARK, Montr\u00e9al, 2020.
Photo: Paul Litherland, courtesy of Centre CLARK, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Bonnie-Baxter\"$
Bonnie Baxter<\/strong>
Voyage<\/em>, 2012, from the series Jane\u2019s Journey<\/em>, 2008-2012.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Bonnie and I have been talking about our dogs for the past fifteen minutes. Our t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates, which happen when I drop by to see her, her partner the sculptor Michel Beaudry, and Charlie (the new dog, a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon), often revolve around the pets. Like many who have come before me\u200a\u2014\u200astudents, collaborators, friends, and others\u200a\u2014\u200aI have always felt welcomed and at home in their world. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s like a giant tableau, full of colour that I move around. It\u2019s like a life\u2019s work,\u201d says Bonnie about the beautiful garden, house, and studio in Val-David. Every time I walk through those front gates, coming face to face with Michel\u2019s mythical ceramic-and-steel creatures, I feel transported, as if I\u2019m traversing a magical portal or going through the wardrobe in Narnia<\/em>. When I cross that threshold, I become part of Bonnie and Michel\u2019s creation, an actor in a tale of wonder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Print-cess of Qu\u00e9bec<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Bonnie\u2019s life story leading up to her fateful introduction to Val-David reads like an epic, full of adventure and with characters and locales fit for a novel. Born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1946 and raised in Oklahoma and Kansas during the 1950s, her childhood was split between America\u2019s Midwestern and Southern states. This exposed her to some of the country\u2019s core ideals in the postwar boom: hardworking corn country, white picket fences, Friday Night Lights, and midwestern nice. When I ask her about how she became an artist in this unusual context, no one moment stands out. \u201cI was just always doing it,\u201d she muses about being creative. \u201cI think there was a fire in me. I had a teacher that told my mom she was worried because my stuff was so weird.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After studying at Monticello College in Illinois, where she painted and drew, made woodcut prints, and worked in ceramics, and Kansas State University, where she studied to become an occupational therapist to appease her parents\u2019 fear that she would become a penniless artist, Bonnie ended up at the illustrious Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1969. \u201cIt was fantastic in an interdisciplinary way,\u201d Bonnie says about this unparalleled learning experience. In this setting, she met her first French-Canadian boyfriend, with whom she would ultimately travel back and forth between Qu\u00e9bec and Italy, where she lived for seven years before returning to Val-David and making it her permanent home in the mid-1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have heard this part of the story before, but it always impresses me: the taxi she drove outside of Detroit to earn money; the farmhouse she purchased in Forano, Italy; the motorcycle with the sidecar for the Doberman pinscher named Diable; and ultimately the separation from her partner followed by the purchase of the land in Val-David where we now sit. \u201cI\u2019ve never done anything I didn\u2019t want to do,\u201d she remarks about her sinuous path. \u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of jobs to support the luxury of doing my artwork. There\u2019s a wonderful life that\u2019s been created from doing this for years.\u201d She still speaks about all these experiences with passion and love. This contributes to her aura. There is magnetism to someone who so unequivocally does what she wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Bonnie-Baxter\"$
Bonnie Baxter<\/strong>
Mourning Eyes<\/em>, from the series RatKind<\/em>, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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After landing in Val-David, Bonnie became a founding member of the Atelier de l\u2019\u00eele, printed at GRAFF in Montr\u00e9al, and firmly established her career as a printmaker as well as a reputable master printer for others. In the early 1980s, in her basement studio, Atelier du Scarab\u00e9e, she printed for Francine Simonin, Kitty Bruneau, and Jean-Paul Riopelle, among others. \u201cI printed for people I respected,\u201d she says. \u201cI tried to see what their soul wanted to express, then to use my craft to bring their voice out.\u201d This period also marked a shift in Bonnie\u2019s own studio practice as she made giant woodcut prints, bringing to life impressive, colourful creatures in the series Spirit Figures<\/em> (1988\u200a\u2013\u200a93). Inspired by folded-bark paper figures made by the Otom\u00ed people of central Mexico to use in healing rituals, she found a conceptual device that resonated with her journey at that moment: undergoing chemotherapy for cancer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy prints kept getting bigger and bigger, in this forever desire to be inside the experience,\u201d Bonnie recounts. \u201cI wanted to be in it, I didn\u2019t want to look at it on the wall, I wanted to be in it.\u201d Looking at these two-dimensional works today, I recognize the worldbuilding that continues to inhabit her aesthetic: bright, vibrant, explosive colours with iconic, punchy figures punctuating dystopian landscapes. The woodcuts feel tense, charged with an electric energy. They are both painful and soothing to behold: a suffering soul is seeking icons and compositional devices to tell her personal story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"Bonnie-Baxter\"$
Bonnie Baxter<\/strong>
Landscape<\/em>, from the series RatKind, <\/em>2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The Last Patch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The 1980s were also when Bonnie began to teach at the university level, a career that would largely contribute to the strong community of collaborators and friends she has developed through the years. As a teacher myself, I have always admired professors like Bonnie, whose time in the classroom becomes an extension of their practice, as they mould young minds and remain dedicated to an openness and vulnerability, to always learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The land in Val-David has become a meeting-place for students, a studio where Bonnie cultivates and nourishes these relationships\u200a\u2014\u200amuch as she does her gardens, which have become iconic. Take, for example, The Patch <\/em>(2020\u200a\u201322), a project in which she built a food resource for Val-David by filling wooden boxes with a variety of tomato plants; inviting guest performers to imagine original works inside this garden over the course of two summers, she then created an immersive videographic 360^{\u00b0<\/sup> experience that was exhibited at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain des Laurentides. With unbridled ambition, Bonnie established a community of artists, technicians, and audience members of over one hundred people\u200a\u2014\u200aa utopia of hope, solidarity, and care within the context of a global pandemic and a climate disaster that has already precipitated food scarcity across the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}
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$\"Bonnie-Baxter\"$
Bonnie Baxter<\/strong>
The Patch Trilogy<\/em>, installation view from Camille Charbonneau\u2019s performance The Queer, The Flower and The Iron Rod<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: Lucien Lisabelle, courtesy of Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain des Laurentides<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
With The Patch<\/em>, much like everything with Bonnie and Michel, the artists become part of a collective, the artworks part of the land and an ecosystem that is fed with labour, love, and mutual respect. Primarily intergenerational, Bonnie\u2019s ecofeminist worldview brings people together in a space that is singularly hers, but also invariably (and gladly) changed by the many hands that shape it. Despite the dire state of the things outside of this patch of brightness, when I ask her about what this ethos might mean for future generations, what she sees in those she has taught over the decades, there is nothing but hope. \u201cLife is wonderful,\u201d she tells me, \u201cI think it\u2019s really tough for kids in this generation, but there\u2019s still the learning, the joy, the going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two hours into our conversation at her studio in Val-David, Charlie the dog soundly asleep in the corner, the mood has shifted considerably from the laughter and jokes at the start, from the glorious, nostalgic retelling of yore. The pitcher of homemade iced tea is empty, the sun is setting, and I need to get home to my own dog, Cosimo. Bonnie and I both know that outside of this room, out in the world, away from this patch, things are not right. I want to sit here a little while longer to hold onto this moment. I want her to tell me things will be okay because, truth be told, I\u2019m afraid. Bonnie catches my sentiment; ever the teacher, the mentor, the friend, she leaves me with something to hold onto. Something to believe in. \u201cIn the end,\u201d she says, \u201call my work has to do with humanity, with people interacting with each other and going forward. Whatever generation, there\u2019s still that drive, to go forward. I think the hope is contained within you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
Bonnie Baxter, Didier Morelli<\/div>\n
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