"We are very different, but we share a passion for art and family and all those things that mean so much."
That's how Cheryl Mae Lobe Therias describes her friendship with Renata Szyrocka. The two artists recently spent three and a half days installing Longitudes and Latitudes, a collection of ceramic dolls by Lobe Therias and paintings and hand stained construction gauze by Szyrocka.
The two women met in France 15 years ago. Lobe Therias says one of the things that drew them together was the fact that they were both from somewhere else, and it became one of the foundations of their exhibit.
"My idea was the fascination with how families move around and how my family managed to get all the way to North Battleford, Saskatchewan ... and how I ended up in France, and all of this plays around in your head."
Lobe Therias was born in North Battleford and grew up at Glaslyn, the daughter of Maurice and Merelyn (Kuetbach) Lobe, who now live in British Columbia, and granddaughter of the late Alfred and Ruth (Bich) Lobe.
Why she became an artist is a question she says her whole family asks. It's curious, she says, since there are no other artists in her family.
"I'll probably be asking that in my next life as well," laughs the holder of a bachelor's degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art in British Columbia and a masters degree in education from Pace University in New York.
Szyrocka was born in Poland and grew up in a area to which her grandmother's family had moved in the hopes of finding more freedom from oppression than regions further east. Szyrocka says her maternal grandmother left everything, her culture, the land they'd worked with nothing but her children and two suitcases.
Szyrocka's parents met when her father came there to study. They married despite their union being frowned upon, and travelled the world as he became a well-known choirmaster. A post card they sent home from Paris was the "tiny seed" that inspired her to move to France in her early 20s in order to study art.
Lobe Therias was also in her early 20s when she moved to France. She says she had always been inspired by France, remembering French classes in Glaslyn based around her teacher's photos from a trip to Paris and her own class trip to France in Grade 11 (when she first met Philippe, whom she would marry in Vancouver in 1987.)
"The more I was inspired by art the more I realized the main artists who influenced me worked with the light in France."
Eventually, while both were residing in the south of France, the two women were introduced by a common aquaintance who predicted their becoming friends in art and inspiration.
Both were active artists, Lobe Therias in painting, printmaking and teaching and Szyrocka in painting and installation.They were also both passionate about their backgrounds and family histories - and how people come to be where they are.
This fascination was further sparked for Lobe Therias when a cousin's research into the paternal side of the family, which Lobe Therias had always supposed to be German, traced their ancestry back to the 1700s in Bessarabia, Russia.
"It was really a catalyst that my roots went back that far," says Lobe Therias. "I'd just thought of myself as second generation Canadian. My dad was born in the Jackpine area, I was born in North Battleford and my granddfather had come up from North Dakota."
It was at that time Lobe Therias's ceramic Messenger Dolls, inspired by the Russian matryoshka doll became an important focus.
When she made the original set of dolls, displayed in the centre of the exhibit at the Chapel Gallery, she didn't even know yet how to throw on the wheel. She imagined each doll representing a generation, and within it was carried the next generation.
"We all carry history within us so we become messengers of life," she says.
The collection has grown to close to 365 since that time.
"It's hard to keep track," she laughs.
Reflected in the series is a life with many moves, including to New York and Toronto, as a result of her husband's job with IBM.
"Every time I moved I would make more families. They have spread into little themes as the years have gone by," she says. "Each group becomes a family in its own right. Some are black sheep, some show more wear and tear because of techniques I used, or things I witnessed or the things I was feeling where I was living."
The catalyst to create an exhibit together came when they were separated. For the last six years Lobe Therias has been in Toronto. The two artists missed their friendship, and they had never done an exhibit together, says Lobe Therias, so Szyrocka found a space in France where they were able to create their show.
Szyrocka interpreted her passion for nature through the vertical line. As a child she would often lie on her side on the beach, observing the horizon as a vertical line. The vertical line also represents a break moving forward, leaving the past behind. Within the pigments of Szyrocka's vertical pieces are reflections of Lobe Therias's dolls. The exhibit opened in 2009.
In that exhibit, the dolls were placed on a layer of sand. In North Battleford's edition, the dolls are placed on pieces of lace that have been passed down through Lobe Therias' families.
Lace is one of the few objects that have successfully travelled over time from one generation to another without breaking, Lobe Therias explains. It's not something that's always valued, she adds.
"Some people say that's old fashioned and they put it in a drawer ... but it's always meant a lot to me."
She has even used the texture of lace in the finish of her ceramic pieces.
Lobe Therias and Szyrocka would like to see their show go global.
"We really would like to take this all over the world," says Lobe Therias. "We are hoping to find someone who would be inspired by our project, bringing peoples together, showing love and harmony in the world rather than all the destruction that we see. We would love to see this on a plane of ice or snow or in a desert."
Szyrocka, who said of Saskatchewan, "It feels like the horizon is bigger here," has now returned to France. Lobe Therias will return at the end of the month. Although she has been in Toronto for the last several years, she is moving back to France now that her younger daughter is about to enter university in British Columbia. Her older daughter is living in London, England.
She will rejoin her husband, who has been back in southern France for two years now, where they will live within blocks of her friend Szyrocka, also the mother of two daughters.
Longitudes and Latitudes, will be at the Chapel Gallery until Aug. 25.
