Camrose Ducote 

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Biography      

 

 As an only child I had lots of time to myself, and I loved making things and doing art.  But setting out for college I decided I should concentrate on a field that would pretty much guarantee me a living, so I majored in Bilingual Elementary Education.  One day in a chaotic classroom convinced me I had made a big mistake.  Having suppressed my creative drive in university to get a diploma I decamped immediately upon graduation to Aspen, Colorado where I skied, nannied three kids plus several animals and earned extra cash creating and selling jewellery I made mostly out of chicken bones.

 

     When the nanny job ended I moved to Los Angeles followed by a summer in New Orleans where I enlarged my jewellery business adding exotic materials such as dried goat turds, snake skins, feathers and even a turquoise raffia placemat to my repertoire of materials.  The work sold well in the French Quarter.

 

     In 1977 I came to Vancouver and scored a free studio downtown  in what was the new Harbour Centre.  When I lost that space, I worked in what was formerly the laundry room of my apartment building casting some twenty life-sized fabric/plaster figures for the B.C. Pavilion for Expo 86 followed by a life-size sculpture of then Mayor Mike Harcourt for the Vancouver Museum.  Then, inspired by some papier-mâché animal sculptures I saw while travelling in Mexico I made a series of over 70 chicken wire trophy heads using materials as diverse as a red shower curtain which became a ten-foot-long alligator as well as a Frilled Lizard with teeth made of cut-up erasers.

In 1985 I sent a herd of twelve ghostly cows of cast fabric supported by split cedar armatures to the 12th International Biennial of Tapestry  exhibiting Textile Sculpture in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

     In the mid 1980’s I made a number of sculptures which I referred to as my egg/nest/womb series using gauze, twigs and rose thorns.  Looking back I wonder if those creations, which were almost like three-dimensional drawings, were leading me to work in two dimensions.  By the time I got my job as a Sculpture Technician in the  Synthetics Department at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1989 I was no longer doing sculpture.

 

Though I enjoy working in two dimensions now I confess to secretly hoarding scavenged deer antlers and recently sawed up a 1950’s horn ashtray that my parents used when I was a kid in order to make a necklace. After all, no one smokes anymore