Through the Leaves to the Trunk: Emily Carr's Invention of Nature

Emily Carr (1871–1945), was one of the first artists of national significance to emerge from the West Coast. Along with the Group of Seven, she became a leading figure in Canadian modern art in the twentieth century. She spent the greater part of her life living and working in Victoria, where she struggled to receive critical acceptance. She is best known for her work documenting the totem poles of First Nations peoples of the province of British Columbia, and for her forest landscapes, painted on oil and described in Klee Wyck (1941, “The Laughing Woman” the name that the Native people of the west coast gave her as an intrepid young woman). In my paper, reading some of her paintings through her writing, I shall try to demonstrate how, behind the microscopic details, worthy of an amateur naturalist, her works are pervaded by sumptuous rococo witticisms, by unknown forces, bold provocations, and sudden glimpses of intuition, which reveal, beyond the "genre painting", the workings of a lively, restless, sharp mind, and a desire for knowledge that, through her perception of the forest, becomes more metaphysical than physical.