Regan Lanning’s latest artistic work offers a look at human relationships, the time it takes to build them and also the effort needed to repair them once fractures occur.
Lanning, who is the curator for the Weyburn Arts Council, discussed the exhibit, Relative Bonds, during a reception Friday night at the Estevan Art Gallery and Museum. Lanning earned the opportunity to have the exhibit after she won the Estevan Arts Council’s Ev Johnson Memorial Adjudicated Art Show in November of last year.
Since that time, she has been working to expand the exhibit from the five works she submitted for the art show to the 30 included in the exhibit.
Relative Bonds features ceramic platters with images of people she has known in her life. She took the photos of those people and painted their images onto the plates.
“I built everything by hand,” she said. “The portraits out there represent the relationships that I have with those people, and clay seems great for that. It’s breakable but it’s strong. It parallels relationships, and most relationships aren’t perfect.”
Once she finished the platters, Lanning tossed them to the ground, causing breaks and fractures. She then repaired the damage using barbed wire and an adhesive.
Her actions symbolize how human relationships can be fractured, and how they take time, effort and patience to be repaired.
A large crowd of family members and friends turned out to congratulate Lanning and view her work. She noted that many of the people who came to the reception are depicted in Relative Bonds.
The next edition of the Weyburn Review will have more on this story.
