No Ordinary Magic: The Art of Laurie Swim

by Carol Bruneau, Laurie Swim (Artist)

Laurie Swim is an artist of extraordinary range and vision. For more than forty years, she has been among the most capable and passionate practitioners of textile art. In her chosen art form, Swim captures the essence of the seacoast. For the ocean, she works with silk, pulling stitches until they pucker to create gentle ripples. For vegetation and seaweed, she combines quilting, embroidery, painting, dyeing, and other seemingly opposing techniques. As award-winning writer Carol Bruneau suggests in No Ordinary Magic , it’s not only Swim’s unconventional use of materials that is distinctive, it’s her gift for narrative that makes her art both resonant and endlessly intriguing. In this retrospective volume, Bruneau explores Swim’s history, her defiance of convention, and her reinvention of quilts as paintings-made-of-fabric. The result is a profound exploration of Swim’s sometimes monumental yet astonishingly intimate work.

104 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2023

About the author

Carol Bruneau is the author of nine books: three short fiction collections and six novels, including Brighten the Corner Where You Are (Fall 2020) and A Circle on the Surface (2018.) Her first novel, Purple for Sky, won the 2001 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Dartmouth Book Award. She lives with her husband in Halifax.

Reviews

[ATLANTIC BOOK REVIEWS · Rating 5 out of 5]

NO ORDINARY MAGIC by Carol Bruneau's Author Page has given us the first retrospective on the innovative work of Nova Scotia textile artist and renowned quilter Laurie Swim and WOW is what I have kept saying with every read of the words and every look at the images and every turn of the pages!
The admiration Carol has for Laurie is evident in each of her carefully and expertly crafted descriptions and it adds to the power of the narrative in this beautiful book. I had to keep reminding myself that the images I were seeing were made with fabric. I felt as if I could walk right in to many of them and oh how I wish I could do so.
There is magic in this book - the beautiful magic that happens when a friend tells a friend's story. Carol Bruneu captures every essence of the intimate relationship Laurie has developed between her chosen artist's medium and her beautiful soul.
From first stitch to last and from first word to last this book is a book to be revisited and sat with over and over again. Sitting on my coffee table I am compelled to pick it up and look through it and to read and re-read passages like this one used to describe Laurie's piece called "Morning Fog."
"...the pieces evokes nothing short of an elegy...But like all great elegies, it's a celebration too - of the wild, of the her and now, the land, the sea, all the real world's currents and flux. It rejoices in the thinnest place possible: the secret place of discovery. Whoever is so privileged and fortunate to happen upon such a place is grace with a gift - not just he gift of its experience, but an awakening."
Awakening, celebrating, rejoicing and graced with a gift is how I felt while spending time with this stunning book.
I first "met" Laurie and her work when I purchased her picture book HOPE AND SURVIVAL: A Story of the Halifax Explosion make both of these books part of your "must buy" list if you haven't already purchased them.

[Sarah Butland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and magical story of process, persistence and passion.