‘Anna Torma: Permanent Danger’ Catalogue Launch and Celebration

Kirsty Bell

Photo: Brian Guthreau

Literary critic Kirsty Bell’s recent essay on Anna Torma and her artist-husband and sons reflects on the narratives in their work. More broadly, she is also interested in visual stories and the ways in which Torma integrates text into her textile art.

Kirsty Bell’s essay “Family Matters” is included in the recent publication Thinking Spaces, a 2021 collection of essays on the work of Anna Torma, Istvan Zsako, and David Zsako, published by the Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery in Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick. She is Associate Professor of French at Mount Allison University. In addition to teaching French language and literature, she is particularly interested in interactions between words and images and in how authors and artists describe their creative processes. She has written articles and essays on writers and artists such as Louise Warren, Daniel Canty, Anna Torma, and Alexandrya Eaton.

Emily Falvey

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Emily Falvey offers a deep contemplation that focuses on Torma’s work Carpet of Many Hands. The author takes this monumental, stitched collage as a point of departure for a personal meditation on the relationship between trauma, the feminine, and the grotesque.

Emily Falvey is an art critic, curator, and art historian who lives and works in Sackville, New Brunswick where she is the Director/Curator of the Owens Art Gallery. In 2009, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded her the Joan Yvonne Lowndes Award for excellence in critical and curatorial writing, and she received curatorial writing awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries in 2006 and 2012. A doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal, her research received funding through the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship (SSHRC).

Anne Koval

Photo: Daniel St. Louis

Art historian Anne Koval explores the Anna Torma’s personal history, how her interests in embroidery evolved matrilineally as her first language of expression and uses feminist strategies of diary-keeping, touch, and excess in her work.

Anne Koval is a curator, writer, and Professor of Art History and Museum and Curatorial Studies at Mount Allison University. Her exhibition Fairy Tails (Owens Art Gallery, 2020) featured the work of Amalie Atkins, Aganetha Dyck, Diana Thorneycroft, Meryl McMaster, Sylvia Ptak, Vicky Sabourin, Anna Torma, Laura Vickerson, and Janice Wright Cheney. She has contributed essays to Stitching the Self: Identity and the Needle Arts (Bloomsbury Press, 2020) and to More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (YYZ Books, 2016). Her ekphrastic poetry appeared in Sarindar Dhaliwal: The Radcliffe Line and Other Geographies (Rodman Hall, 2018). She is currently writing a biography of Mary Pratt (Goose Lane Editions, 2022).

Sarah Quinton

Sarah Quinton has contributed a compilation of interviews with Anna Torma, foregrounding the artist’s voice to create new resonance with her personal narratives and social commentary: “Our very existence is in danger… Our living conditions, our ability to survive, depend on ecological thinking: the realization that the earth is a closed system, that everything is connected.”

Sarah Quinton is the curator of Anna Torma: Permanent Danger and Curatorial Director at the Textile Museum of Canada. She has curated many exhibitions that put cultural inclusivity and social awareness at the forefront through public programs and community outreach. Her curatorial practice includes benchmark projects that have come to define a discourse that focuses on complex intersections between art, craft, and design. She has taught and lectured at museums, galleries, universities, and colleges in Canada and abroad.

Anna Torma

Photo: Louis Philippe Chiasson

Anna Torma is the winner of the prestigious 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts–Saidye Bronfman Award. She is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, a recipient of the New Brunswick Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in Visual Arts, and the Strathbutler Award from the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation. For over 40 years, Torma has exhibited her work in Canada and internationally, and is represented in public and private collections around the world. Born in Tarnaörs, Hungary, in 1952, Torma graduated with a degree in Textile Art and Design from the Hungarian University of Applied Arts, Budapest in 1979. She immigrated to Canada in 1988 and now lives in Baie Verte, New Brunswick, Canada.