Text by Tovah Martin | Photography by Kindra Clineff
Artist Laurie Swim translates Canadian seascapes into Shimmering textiles.
Laurie Swim knows every subtlety of the seacoast. She learned every ripple of the water growing up in the little fishing town of Lockeport, Nova Scotia. “It’s actually an island, connected to the mainland by a half-mile-long white sand beach,” Laurie says. “My family goes back four or five generations in the town; we’re related to the original Lockes.” From her ancestors she claims to have gained a subliminal connection with the water, knowing its gentle moods as well as its fierce wrath. When Laurie thinks of home, bright seaside shanties and masts come to mind—instead of backyards, she sees boulders and barnacles.
Laurie left Nova Scotia to attend art school where she explored textiles as her medium. From there, she toured Europe before settling into an apprenticeship with a weaver in Denmark. But weaving didn’t give her the flexibility she craved so she began working with fabric in a more freeform style. She basically paints in fiber using threads instead of brushstrokes. It didn’t take long for her creativity to win the nascent artist instant acclaim, and soon she was sewing commissions for corporate clients who requested immense wall hangings. Initially, while making a name in the art world, she was based in Toronto. But Nova Scotia always remained in her psyche. So in 2003, when the town of Lunenburg asked Laurie to compose a work of art to commemorate their 250th Anniversary, she went back for good.
In Laurie’s gallery in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the walls are hung with odes to the ocean and the quaint, close-knit communities that have settled on its shores. To capture the essence of the seacoast that is her home, she employs fabrics. For the ocean that she’s known her entire life, she often works with silk, pulling stitches until they pucker to create gentle ripples. She paints the horizon to capture the different moods above the seascape. To depict the vegetation and seaweed, she has developed techniques that combine quilting, embroidery, painting, dyeing, and various other artistic/seamstress tricks. Townspeople drop off snippets of fabric with the hope that their scraps might find a role in one of her murals. She orders Dupioni silk online, Angelina fibers, and cobweb lace and dyes layers of cheesecloth to achieve just the right texture to match the terrain. Guiding her sewing machine, she deftly runs stitches through the fabric to create waves, sand, or grasses. Beads become periwinkle shells, and she stitches hidden images of angels in the sun-scorched rock faces.
Laurie typically documents the tranquility of the seaside towns she knows so well and the heritage of the fishing trade that lured her ancestors to first come to the region. But the ocean can be fickle, and she’s often called upon to document the history of calamities at sea. For her native Lockeport, she wanted to tell the story of a horrific storm that tore into the village and its inhabitants in 1961. Laurie can still remember the tragedy that occurred the day when three fishing vessels were lost at sea. For a millennium project, she honored the 17 fishermen that were killed in the storm in a 10×10-foot quilt using snapshots provided by their families surrounded by a storm-at-sea pattern frame.
Rather than the sea’s turbulence, Laurie’s work usually tells a more placid tale of shimmering water reflecting sparkling light and colorful dories aground on the beach. She shows the weathered offshore “fish stores,” where fishermen stash their gear and bait, and she captures the brightly colored fishing hamlets with names like Sand Cove in Blue Rocks and Stonehurst.
After 40 years of working with fabrics, Laurie instinctively knows how to make a sewing machine do her bidding to tell a tale. But still, she claims that “there’s a surprising amount of serendipity that happens in the process.” Sometimes, fabric has a mind of its own, just like the many moods of the ocean. Often, fanciful magic occurs when she takes textiles in her hands. But there is one common thread that runs throughout. All of Laurie’s creations come from the heart.