HERMIE HERO: MARY PRATT

Food speaks to aestheticism as well as to gluttony but, today it speaks to the empowered female identity.

Mary Pratt is like many women of her generation, with the exception that her name has become synonymous with Canadian Realist painting. Pratt is a product of her time, and her relations to race, sex and class situate her within the very system of power structures that not only endows a place of privilege, owing to upbringing and education, but also allows the freedom to make personal choice.

A general assumption was that women's artistic practice developed from a craft tradition associated with the domestic sphere and that the female would produce functional objects such as those created in pottery and textile, while men produced fine arts such as sculpture or paintings.

Female practitioners at the turn of the last century were revolutionaries. Painting, photography and drawing underwent a shift in representation from woman as subject to woman as subject-creator, placing Mary Pratt at the forefront of such a pivotal development in art history.

By the representation of food, Pratt takes on issues of identity, gender and symbolism in her hyper-realistic paintings making her a hermie hero as well as a personal favourite in the long list of brilliant idols. Her point of view confronts the viewer with a classic renaissance perspective charged with the human emotion engendered by her moments of epiphany, transforming the mundane into monumental. (the story of hermie island life).

Deadman, Patricia, Lawrence, Robin. "Simple Bliss: The paintings and prints of Mary Pratt." Mackenzie Art Gallery, 2004.