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Frances E. Dorsey (1948) lives in Portuguese Cove, Nova Scotia, and teaches at NSCAD University. Born in Abington, Pennsylvania [Tuscaloosa, Alabama?], she earned an MFA (1991) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor after graduating from the Ontario College of Art & Design (1989); and a BA (1971) from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. In 2001 Dorsey received a Canada Council Creation Grant and a Nova Scotia Arts Council Grant.

As a child in the 1950s she lived in Viet Nam, while her father, a decorated World War II combat veteran, spent several years working at the United States Embassy in Saigon. This experience, along with her father's writings and photographs, figures prominently in much of her work.

A dyer, printer and weaver, "Dorsey remembers Saigon as a serene and beautiful city. Yet, in hindsight, she dwelt in 'paradise on the edge of conflagration. Most people I knew there were later killed. And of course many high school classmates went there to be killed or maimed. My heaven was hell for most people.' Dark themes are belied by the vibrancy of the work, which is based in textiles, both dye and print, and also weaving."

An associate professor at NSCAD University, Dorsey works in cloth as a way of engaging critically with painting and of bringing global themes within the scope of family life and domestic practices. Much of her work includes photo-derived images of war. In this context, her use of distressed, pieced-together, salvaged cloth–a pictorial version of the patchwork quilt–offers a pointed critique of the tradition of “history painting” in which large paintings on canvas glorify war. Positioning herself in relation to this ideological terrain she comments that “my family’s roots are in the Southern US, where the War Between the States was ever present–it was a defeated country. Battles were fought on your turf, your ancestors died defending their land. War was associated with courage and the protection of what was precious.”

The works in this exhibition fuse the artist’s memories of a deceptively peaceful Saigon with her father’s journal entries concerning the war in Europe that had ended ten years earlier. Floating over reed-like clumps of rice, the father’s shocked account of life at the front accentuates the disorienting effects of the works’ formal qualities. For many people, “Saigon” and “rice paddies” conjure horrific associations with events in Viet Nam and Cambodia–and, by extension, with the continuing armed conflict in Iraq. For Dorsey, this ominous landscape may represent the process of dis-illusionment that brought her to Canada as a conscientious objector, later transforming her into a peace activist–and her father into a chronic depressive.

Frances Dorsey’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at Eye Level Gallery (1999), Eastern Edge (1997), and Anna Leonowens Gallery (2003, 2004). She has also taken part in significant group exhibitions such as Image Rites (1997, MSVU Art Gallery) and Jacquard 2000 (Centre des Textiles Montreal). She was the inaugural recipient of the Lillian Elliott Award (1995, Berkeley, CA) which supports emerging artists creating exceptional fibre work, and served as elected Co-chair of the 2006 Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium held in Toronto.