Lori Doody

ARTIST PROFILE

Lori Doody was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1976. She majored in printmaking at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook, graduating in 1998. Shortly thereafter she started working at St. Michael’s Printshop in St. John’s, first as a scholarship recipient, then as a technician and currently as a renting artist. Other professional experiences include artist residencies in Dublin, Ireland and Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

In 2005 she was named “Emerging Artist of the Year” by the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. She currently lives in St. John’s with her husband and their two young children.

Papier Couture is a suite of prints based on some of my favorite childhood interests: playing dress up and drawing and making clothes. As a child I was a little obsessed with clothing, for me and for my dolls. These prints reflect my childhood drawings with their small scale and their simple, ordered compositions. They also explore the visual appeal of clothing; its patterning, shapes and colours. Clothes are more than a necessity; they are a visual means of expression that demonstrate the basic elements of design: form, colour, and texture. We don’t simply enjoy wearing clothes, we like to look at them in magazines and catalogues, on television, and online.

These prints are also inspired by Jim Dine’s etchings of tools and by Pop Art imagery of everyday objects. I have also removed mundane objects from any context to focus on stylized drawings of simplified shapes, albeit using a much smaller scale.

I always begin a print with a title, often times using puns, idioms, quotes or phrases that make light of the way that the fashion industry sells clothing. These prints celebrate the elegant shoes that are too painful to wear, the pretty underwear that nobody sees, the special dress with no special occasion and all the unused clothes hidden in a closet.

My first picture books Capelin Weather and The Puffin Problem are being published in spring of 2017.

Lori Doody