Northern arts fest
Artists from the North converge on Inuvik

Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

NNSL (July 05/99) - The Great Northern Arts Festival approaches quickly.

In a couple of weeks, from July 16 to 25, dozens upon dozens of artists, practising too many arts and crafts to list, will converge on the Northern community of Inuvik for what is one of the largest cultural events in the territories.

When Ann Timmins, who currently lives in Yellowknife, talks about going to the festival she becomes animated.

She will be mixing and mingling with fellow artists for an entire week. She'll be exhibiting her work and learning from others about the work they do.

Artists of all stripes will form a community of vibrant exchange, invoking the muses of creativity and learning.

Timmins has a wide- ranging background, and today her art is an amalgamation of media and technique that she has acquired through the years. In the great hall of the legislative assembly in Yellowknife hang a series of twelve silk banners titled The Web of Life. Each hand-dyed banner measures 45 inches by 100 inches.

Timmins worked on the banners for four to five months.

"I went a little bit insane," she says. "

The banners, she realized, couldn't simply be done with silk paints. She had to think in terms of longevity since the banners would hang only a couple of metres from a "huge light source."

Painting and photography provide the inspiration for the fabric art that she does.

As Timmins explains, art has always been a part of her expressive life. But eventually, reality kicked in and it was time to make a living. She started on the path that would lead to her present work.

"Wondering how to make a living in art, I enroled in textile design at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design," remembers Timmins.

She then studied at the Ontario College of Art. To these schools come artists from all over the world. She was exposed to international art, not just regional art, Timmins explains.

This sense of the wide world of art was not a new experience to her. By the age of eight, the artist had already been to England, Scotland, Libya and Jamaica, which goes a long way to explain how her current work contains wide-ranging influences in colour and form.

After school came work in the carpet industry.

"It was exciting to find a position in the carpet industry as a designer and dye assistant. The custom designed and dyed wool carpets were the most fascinating to follow as they passed through the phases of production after leaving the design phase," remembers Timmins.

"My role was to interpret a client's ideas, render a painted design and formulate the matching wool colours. The company also required original designs for their showroom in Toronto."

Then came work on wool tapestries, a return to the pen and ink drawing she had done as a teenager and finally, after working for a time with the British Columbia forest service when her marriage ended, Timmins returned to school to the Nova Scotia College of Geographic Sciences.

"The visual images of my earlier artwork were blending with the land forms and the intricate detail of river systems," explains Timmins.

"I was attracted to the abstract shapes of land and water in aerial views. The 12 panels for the Web of Life commissioned by the legislative assembly portray the land and the life that it gives to those upon it."

New paintings that Timmins has been working on show yet another evolution. Moving from vast captured images of the land, she has been photographing precise close-up images of the land and painting from these minute patterns. Yet far from being concerned with representing the photographic image exactly and accurately, her main focus continues to be colour and pattern.

"I'm always exploring new ways of putting colour together," she says.

"That's the big turn-on -- colour. Trying to represent colour. I want to do things that radiate colour, colour that adapts to the environment."

The mother of an adult son from her first marriage and two children aged 12 and 8, Timmins is also exploring her connection with children and childhood. She has most recently illustrated the award-winning children's book The Man in the Moon, published by the Northern company Ravenrock Publishing.