Mary Joyce
Biography 2024
Mary Joyce is an artist born in Montreal, living in Edmonton. An award-winning printmaker, drawer and painter, she has been producing and exhibiting in Canada and Europe since 1986. The culture of resistence, how things work, sensory retention through body memory, labour, 'womens' work,' industrial architecture and engineering provide material for her investigations.
“Mary has been a force in the Edmonton art community for many years as a printmaker, painter, teacher and organizer. I curated an exhibition of her paintings entitled Speeding Subject that featured some of her most innovative and beautiful work. The Speeding Subject exhibition proposed a cinematic and sculptural approach to painting and drawing by conceiving pictorial space from the back of a motorcycle! The resulting series is a marvellous fusion of lyrical beauty and sensual exhilaration.” Marcus Miller, 2011
She works to make memorable, events that are documented by news media, then forgotten. This is one of the jobs of artists: call attention to social and political change, to potential for art-and life-altering consequences. As art emerges in the streets in calls for rights, so she wishes to bring the streets into art. Find a way to involve viewers in the action! Make the studio a street, turn the gallery into a lane beside the thoroughfare.
From 2000-2012, her work documented the imprint of sensory information from rapid passage through time and space, speed, on the artist’s body, mind and heart. Investigating memory and consciousness, she asks: how the body, mind and heart are simultaneously imprinted with sensory evidence of rapid passage through time and space, the indelibility of specific places in imagination. Drawings she makes while in motion signify the primary experience of the present passing into past, future becoming present. In 2012, Mary Joyce’s long lasting exploration of speed, time and space drew her attention to cities, crowds, red squares and safety pins, an upsurge of social change, of political mobilization and citizen engagement. Since then, the upsurge continues and by its vitality, invites ongoing celebration of the courage and resilience of its activists.
Joyce has won a range of Art Awards and Grants. From Salon International Art Résilience held at St. Frajou, France, of 2018, 17 and 16 she won 1st prize, 2nd prize and the Jury prize. Her work is collected in the Alberta Art Foundation; Society of Northern Alberta Print Archives; the Misericordia Hospîtal and U of A Hospital Collections; University Collections, University of Alberta; WP Wagner High School; the Edmonton and District Labour Council Collection; SACRED Association; all Edmonton, Savage Collection of Canadian Prints at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary; the Flint Printshop Archives at the Hamilton Art Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario; the Ad Axiom Gallery Collection in Burlington, Ontario; Manitoba Printmakers’ Association Archives in Winnipeg, Manitoba; East Husky Oil Project of Newfoundland; and private collections in Canada, the US and Europe.
Mary Joyce holds Visual Arts (BFA Printmaking) and Education (BEd) degrees from University of Alberta; BA in Literature and Art History (Honours Double Major) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She has completed mentorships and workshops with some of Canada’s best-known artists: Sheila Butler, Shirley Witasaalo, the late Garry Williams and John Chalke. She organized and achieved successful art production relationships with print-artist Alan Flint and with electro-acoustic composer Gerhard Ginader.
“In the invention of a personal vocabulary, one arrives at an authentic voice. Mary Joyce has achieved that through a unique interplay of images and techniques.” Glen Allison, reCurrentworks 1996 pg.3
Biography 2024
Mary Joyce is an artist born in Montreal, living in Edmonton. An award-winning printmaker, drawer and painter, she has been producing and exhibiting in Canada and Europe since 1986. The culture of resistence, how things work, sensory retention through body memory, labour, 'womens' work,' industrial architecture and engineering provide material for her investigations.
“Mary has been a force in the Edmonton art community for many years as a printmaker, painter, teacher and organizer. I curated an exhibition of her paintings entitled Speeding Subject that featured some of her most innovative and beautiful work. The Speeding Subject exhibition proposed a cinematic and sculptural approach to painting and drawing by conceiving pictorial space from the back of a motorcycle! The resulting series is a marvellous fusion of lyrical beauty and sensual exhilaration.” Marcus Miller, 2011
She works to make memorable, events that are documented by news media, then forgotten. This is one of the jobs of artists: call attention to social and political change, to potential for art-and life-altering consequences. As art emerges in the streets in calls for rights, so she wishes to bring the streets into art. Find a way to involve viewers in the action! Make the studio a street, turn the gallery into a lane beside the thoroughfare.
From 2000-2012, her work documented the imprint of sensory information from rapid passage through time and space, speed, on the artist’s body, mind and heart. Investigating memory and consciousness, she asks: how the body, mind and heart are simultaneously imprinted with sensory evidence of rapid passage through time and space, the indelibility of specific places in imagination. Drawings she makes while in motion signify the primary experience of the present passing into past, future becoming present. In 2012, Mary Joyce’s long lasting exploration of speed, time and space drew her attention to cities, crowds, red squares and safety pins, an upsurge of social change, of political mobilization and citizen engagement. Since then, the upsurge continues and by its vitality, invites ongoing celebration of the courage and resilience of its activists.
Joyce has won a range of Art Awards and Grants. From Salon International Art Résilience held at St. Frajou, France, of 2018, 17 and 16 she won 1st prize, 2nd prize and the Jury prize. Her work is collected in the Alberta Art Foundation; Society of Northern Alberta Print Archives; the Misericordia Hospîtal and U of A Hospital Collections; University Collections, University of Alberta; WP Wagner High School; the Edmonton and District Labour Council Collection; SACRED Association; all Edmonton, Savage Collection of Canadian Prints at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary; the Flint Printshop Archives at the Hamilton Art Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario; the Ad Axiom Gallery Collection in Burlington, Ontario; Manitoba Printmakers’ Association Archives in Winnipeg, Manitoba; East Husky Oil Project of Newfoundland; and private collections in Canada, the US and Europe.
Mary Joyce holds Visual Arts (BFA Printmaking) and Education (BEd) degrees from University of Alberta; BA in Literature and Art History (Honours Double Major) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She has completed mentorships and workshops with some of Canada’s best-known artists: Sheila Butler, Shirley Witasaalo, the late Garry Williams and John Chalke. She organized and achieved successful art production relationships with print-artist Alan Flint and with electro-acoustic composer Gerhard Ginader.
“In the invention of a personal vocabulary, one arrives at an authentic voice. Mary Joyce has achieved that through a unique interplay of images and techniques.” Glen Allison, reCurrentworks 1996 pg.3