Description

THE SMALL, QUIET MOMENTS

Tawny Maclachlan Capon

Textile art, which I have spent much of my career as an artist creating, takes a long time. Turning ideas into viable concepts, and those concepts into reality, into pieces of art that will grace a studio, a gallery, or a home, requires weeks, months, sometimes even years. So part of my daily sustenance as an artist, especially after a long day spent in my studio on Gabriola stitching and creating textile art, is to head outdoors into the environment of the Coast Salish world, to walk and feel the earth, to observe what nature is doing and the patterns it shows me, and to receive what it gives back to me in ideas and memories.

Those small quiet moments experienced in the natural world, of flashes of light reflecting from wet seaweed on a rock or a piece of arbutus bark curling off a tree trunk in the wind, have offered me inspiration and a way to be creative in a different medium. In that medium, they have also offered me immediacy – the ability to be fulfilled in the present, personally as well as artistically. 

In July 2015, I joined a new social media platform called Instagram. At the start, Instagram was just a way for me to share with family and close friends some of the photographs I had started making on my walks. But over time, it also provided a space for me to be creative in a different medium. 

Instagram enabled me to share the gifts of these small, quiet spaces and moments in time in nature. Despite being a digital medium, it also allowed me to do it in a natural way. The photographs I make (originally on an iPhone 4 and now on an iPhone 13) are unchanged and not manipulated in any way. My goal has been to make all my images work well to be seen on a screen just 2½ by 3¼ inches in size, so that viewers can see what I have seen, and the memories I have collected, without interference or any filters, and with the same immediacy that I have experienced.

In 2023 Instagram has become full of noise – advertising, “influencers,” and other distractions pervade the platform. In the face of that it has become more important than ever to me to persevere in sharing these unfiltered quiet moments and memories with my now more than 600 followers from all over the world – from as far afield as New Zealand, Tasmania, Europe and Africa – and to remain focused on the real, the natural, without human interference.

Almost all of the more than 2,000 images I have now posted on Instagram have been made on Gabriola Island. Here, printed for the first time – again, on matte with no manipulation – are just fifteen of those images.

Tawny Maclachlan Capon is a visual artist whose work has been shown worldwide and who has been represented in Toronto by the David Kaye Gallery. You can see more of her extensive body of work at <www> tawny.gallery as well as on Instagram:<www>instagram.com/tawnymaclachlancapon/