An exhibition of sculpture and paintings by Susan Barton-Tait and Corine van Hoeve
Essay and curation by Natalie Hunter
Art Fair Hamilton, September 26-28, 2025
details of ‘brickworks’
Installing 1319 Bricks in brickworks
Curatorial essay by Natalie Hunter
An exhibition of sculpture and paintings by Susan Barton-Tait and Corine van Hoeve
Walking through Gage Park, I meet a familiar site; rusty red pigmented dust coating the road, with row upon row of stacked bricks piled high like towers in the yard by the railway. This is what I remember as a child while walking along the paths with my grandfather feeding squirrels in the park. When we’d reach Lawrence Road he’d point out the iconic brick oven stack of Hamilton Brick Works just across from the baseball fields.
Hamilton Brick Works occupies a prominent location alongside Hamilton’s escarpment. Embedded directly into the rich red clay at the base of the mountain, bricks were churned out of this factory for over a century. These same bricks were used to build my grandparents home along Cumberland Avenue, and likely used to build many others in Hamilton’s historic neighbourhoods. The image of a red brick is physically embedded in the regional architecture of Hamilton’s neighbourhoods, but also becomes a deeply seeded memory that permeates the consciousness of Hamiltonians. Susan Barton-Tait and Corine van Hoeve both use these iconic red bricks as symbols, references, and material traces in their work.
Often escaping our immediate notice, the brick is a mass produced construction material that forms the foundation of a home. Susan Barton-Tait uses the brick as an object to encase and trace, while referencing the process, seriality, and labour in which these bricks were originally made. Using a single brick as an inverted mould, she coats the sides of each brick in layers of wax. When the wax cools it is peeled off to form a two-dimensional skin that becomes a mirrored mould. Susan then begins a labour intensive process of applying paper pulp to the moulds. Layer by layer the pulp is added to form a two-dimensional trace of the brick surface captured in wax. When the pulp dries into paper, it is peeled off of the wax mould and folded back into a three dimensional form that mirrors the original brick. Maintaining volume, but lacking weight and mass, these impressions of a brick are stacked, piled, and jumbled into mounds containing hundreds of delicately cast paper bricks that maintain the subtle nuances and details of the original found brick. Like a brickmaker shaping clay into identical rectangles using a mould, Susan repeats her process over and over again; forming impressions and traces of the brick held within the delicacies of paper. The
juxtaposition between the heavy, dense, red brick, and the subtle weightlessness of the white paper softens this utilitarian object. Quiet and understated, with an aesthetic that mimics the texture of braille, Susan’s bricks are impactful in their own right. They are embedded with elements of her hand-made, fibre-based, and time consuming process that counters the industrial process in which bricks are formed, fired, and hardened for building materials.
Brickmaking and bricklaying are highly skilled trades crafts. A bricklayer spends years as an apprentice honing their craft until the acts of mudding, laying, and pointing with a trowel become second nature. For Corine van Hoeve, witnessing the ease with which bricklayers wield a trowel to build a wall in her Dundas home is akin to the thick layers of oil paint that build up in her paintings using palette knives and broad brushstrokes. Blocking in the image while painting the brick from life, Corine uses scale and impressionist realism to celebrate the humble brick. Her large scale painting of a single individual brick functions as a heroic portrait of a long used but often overlooked building material. Larger than life, these paintings isolate Hamilton’s iconic brick found in many working-class dwellings and heritage homes across the city. Highlighting the stamped Hamilton name, this humble brick is raised to the status of high art. The subtle nuances captured in thick impasto celebrates the labour associated with brickmaking and construction work. Employing a palette of warm burnt umber, and burnt sienna, Corine’s smaller paintings on paper maintain the immediacy of the painting process. Often produced a la prima in a matter of hours, each painting contains traces of the artist’s hand. Layers of palette knife and brush work almost read like wet clay before a brick is dried and fired. Clustered together in compositions of three to five, these true to life sized paintings allow me to imagine what is underneath the pure white drywall of the space they hang in. It’s as if Corine has peeled back the wall to reveal the foundation of the building underneath. Her use of trompe l’oeil heightens this assumption, and I am unable to distinguish the real brick wall from its skilled copy.
The utilitarian brick as an art object within art history is nothing new. Long before Carl Andre was stacking bricks in minimalist sculptural gestures in the 1970’s, bricks were individually hand made and used by indigenous cultures across the world to build civilizations that are still standing today. Many cities of Europe and the British Isles were shaped by bricks during the industrial revolution. This humble material contains a rich global history. With an astute attention to materials, process, and the meaning they create, Susan’s paper bricks, and Corine’s oil paintings transform Hamilton’s humble red brick into poetic gestures of regional labour, and a powerful symbol of what it takes
to build a home. Using processes that reflect their respective disciplines Susan Barton- Tait and Corine van Hoeve reframe and reimagine the humble Hamilton brick as a social, and cultural signifier. Their approaches to making reflect processes of labour and memory embedded within Hamilton’s core values and history as a working class city. And they make visible the influences of architecture in our daily lives.
Curatorial Essay by Natalie Hunter
Curator Biography
Natalie Hunter is an artist and educator born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. Over the past thirteen years she has worked across photography, installation, sculpture, and the moving image, and is mostly known for her multilayered and experiential photo-based installations on transparent film. Her studio practice engages with the poetics of time, memory, temporality, chance, perception, the archive, and the senses – with an emphasis on embodied experience, perception, materiality, personal memory, and identity. Natalie Hunter is the recipient of many Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grants, and Ontario Arts Council Visual Artists Creation Project Grants and has shown her work in public art galleries and artist-run-centres across Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo where she is a sessional instructor, and received an Excellence in Online Teaching Award (2017). She lives and works in her home city of Hamilton, Ontario.
natalie-hunter.com
(photography: Natalie Hunter, Susan Barton-Tait, Corine van Hoeve)