The images of the urban environment in Environs were selected by traveling one kilometer North, East, South, and West of the gallery in which the work was shown, Mercer Union.  The images were stitched into scrolls of paper. 4' x 10', 4' x 10', and 4' by 20'.

 Tiny Stitches:  Environs by Beth Howe

by Eric Mathew 

'Beth Howe creates quiet monuments.  Her practice is rooted primarily in drawing, secondarily in book works.  The confluence of these disciplines results in a unique approach to cataloguing the everyday.  Howe seeks out the most mundane and archetypal of urban spaces and painstakingly renders them as spaces that resonate as a result of their familiarity.  The rigour of her investigation of a chosen milieu is exhaustive, with chosen details highly articulated.  Of immediate interest to any viewer is that she elects to draw her subjects in bookbinding thread.  This thin strong thread, which resembles corn silk, is stitched into heavy paper in lieu of graphite, ink or charcoal.  Close inspection of these stitches brings great reward, and the scope of her process is humbling. Howe first used this approach to drawing in more traditional book works.  Her innovative use of the physical binding of the book to render the imagery contained within it led to further experimentation.  Eventually the unique drawings took precedence and the book thread remained as a vestige of the book/image relationship.   

The drawings in her most recent series, Environs at Mercer Union, are meaningful in the assuredness of each mark, each stitch. Reaching almost nine by four feet, the drawings take the form of scrolls.  Medieval scrolls are incredibly labour-intensive works that serve as records to preserve the past for future generations.   Howe’s works are meaningful because of the monastic patience she awards each drafted landscape, regardless of its banality.  Coupled with Howe’s masterful markmaking and dedication to process, what completes the trifecta is Environs "Cagean" ancestry.  Overwhelmed by the surplus of quotidian scenes in which to make her investigations, Howe decided to limit her options considerably.  Impressed by John Cages’ formulaic use of the coin toss and games of chance to make prints and drawings, she located her quest for imagery by similar fashion.  Each of the four drawings in Environs, depicts the scene exactly one kilometer due north, east, south, and west of the gallery site, Mercer Union.  By imposing these limits on her choice of imagery the works become a site-specific exploration as opposed to merely artist renderings of the local neighbourhoods.  Each site is easily accessible, and potentially familiar to a viewer.  Subsequently her drawings serve as an homage, a chronicle, and an index of the landscape surrounding the gallery.     

Howe alludes to the challenge in resisting the urge to focus on the more abject details of her final source locations.  In the case of her northern destination, she was presented with an enticing disaster surrounding a collapsed garage, but it fell just beyond the site her formula had dealt her.  She speaks of her final decision to stick with the plan:
It wasn’t honest, and the pull was that all too human, morbid curiosity for disaster.  A rubbernecker’s fascination with catastrophe.  Spectacle.  This is not my interest.  I am pursuing the insistently non-spectacular.  The everyday.”
Here we see where the success of Howe’s work truly rests.  For within these quiet monuments to the quotidian, everyday, and underappreciated spaces we inhabit, we are presented not with hyperbole, but with realist drama.  Drama that doesn’t beg to be recorded and remembered, but one that should be preserved, just because.  We are asked to be, as Dave Hickey writes,  “okay with everyday life and beguiled by the tininess of it – and beguiled as well by the tininess and intimacy of artistic endeavors…”.