As a social anthropologist concerned with issues surrounding urban settlement, it may come as no surprise that Rae Bridgman was drawn to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, a fictional tale of conversations between Marco Polo (1254-1324) and Kublai Khan (1216-1294) in which the young Venetian explorer attempts to capture the essence of many urban centres within the aging Tartar ruler's vast empire. However, Bridgman also found that Calvino's book served to inspire her work as an artist. The nine crazy quilts and accompanying bookworks that comprise Bridgman's 'Invisible Cities' exhibition have been created between 1999 and 2002 in response to Calvino's text. Seven of the pieces visualize cities described by Calvino: Zora, Aglaura, Ersilia, Argia, Thekla, Olinda and Theodora. Two others--Alfalfa and Umbra--are of the artist's own devising, potential add-ons to the fifty-five cities discussed in the novel.One intriguing aspect of Bridgman's Invisible Cities is that she employs a medium traditionally associated with women to depict her vision of metropolises that are identified as female in the
novel. Calvino's book is written from a male perspective; the author and the two main characters are men. The cities, on the other hand, are always female and always elusive. Polo's fantastic descriptions serve only to frustrate the Khan, who seeks tangible expositions of the places he possesses.

Bridgman pictures these cities in keeping with Victorian crazy quilt conventions and with her concerns for the preservation of the environment, by using reclaimed materials to construct her artworks. Making regular trips to Value Village and Sally Ann to gather fabrics that are both plush and plain, Bridgman sews scraps together with decorative stitchwork by selecting cotton embroidery threads from her "paintbox" of plentiful colour choices. This decorative work is showcased to its greatest potential in Alfalfa, the largest and earliest piece in the exhibition. Having taken two years to complete, Alfalfa is not only a description of an invisible city, it is also an homage to the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee that protects the growth of this crop on the Canadian Prairies. Many of the embroidered forms represent alfalfa and the beehive structures from different vantage points and at various stages of development.

For Zora, Bridgman incorporated hexagonal quilt shapes originally designed by her grandmother in the 1960s. These forms are well-suited to envision a city which "is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remembeR..." Bridgman has asserted that she learned needlework from her mother and grandmother and the inclusion of her ancestor's work in this piece recalls her artistic lineage.

Several of the quilts in the exhibition integrate photo-based imagery, which differentiates the pieces from traditional textile media. Some of the photographs were taken from publications while others, including the lion's head in Theodora and the serpent-like figures in Ersilia, are architectural details of buildings in Winnipeg's Exchange District. One of the concerns shared by many urban planners, social activists and artists alike is the manner in which metropolitan historic structures are constantly threatened with demolition. Indeed, never- ending destruction and re-building are themes that run throughout Calvino's novel. In fact, the narrator describes Ersilia as a place where the inhabitants are constantly dismantling their homes and moving further away from the city's core--"when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last."

Bridgman's inclusion of evidence of our own city's early development adds a layer of local history to her Invisible Cities and perhaps serves as a plea to reconsider the levelling of more of our community's heritage sites.

Alongside the sparkling colours and textures of the silks, satins, brocades, cottons and velvets in each of Bridgman's quilts are bookworks in which the artist quotes a passage from Calvino's text that describes the corresponding city. Just as she uses aged materials for her quilts, Bridgman reclaims old volumes upon which she inscribes Calvino's words and adds visual embellishments.

With the exhibition Invisible Cities, Bridgman has said that she "offers viewers metaphysical, imaginary, visionary and utopian urban fabric translations of Calvino's text." In doing so, the artist's materials, subjects and themes represent a marriage of her anthropological concerns and her visual arts practice.

Rae Bridgman is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research in the Department of City Planning in the School of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. Her book Safe Haven: The Story of a Shelter for Homeless Women was published by University of Toronto Press earlier this year. Included among her varied research interests are child-friendly cities and participatory planning and design. Bridgman received a Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto. She also obtained a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies and a PhD in Social Anthropology from York University. Bridgman has been a practicing artist for more than twenty years. Having turned to the creation of quiltworks in 1997, her earlier work focused on mask imagery and sculptural installations. She has been awarded numerous grants for her art from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Manitoba Arts Council. Invisible Cities was first exhibited at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto in 2002. Bridgman's next solo exhibition, 'Hidden Cities,' is a continuation of 'Invisible Cities,' and will appear at Winnipeg's Craftspace Gallery in May of 2004.

Jennifer Gibson
Art Curator Department
University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E9
Ph: (204) 786-9253
Fax: (204) 774-4134
Email: j.gibson@uwinnipeg.ca