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MSVU Collection


Artist
¤ Svava Juliusson

Date of Work
¤ 2003

Accession Year
¤ 2003

Accession Number
¤ 2003.3

Location
¤ In storage

Media
¤ Sculpture / Installation
¤ Textile



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Svava Thordis Juliusson
Blanket Sacrifice

Svava Thordis Juliusson, Blanket Sacrifice
Svava Thordis Juliusson, Blanket Sacrifice
Svava Thordis Juliusson
Blanket Sacrifice 2003
various materials: wool, discarded clothing, wood

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Svava Thordis Juliusson
(b. 1966 Siglufjordur, Iceland; lives in Toronto, ON)

Blanket Sacrifice 2003
about 60 sheep-sized elements (salvaged woolen blankets stuffed with discarded clothing), wooden barrow, wooden platform.
installed dimensions vary
Purchased with support from the Canada Council Acquisitions Assistance Program, 2003
2003.3

Svava Thordis Juliusson, for whom Blanket Sacrifice was the first major sculpture of her emergent career, began this work in response to a 2001 headline in the Chronicle Herald newspaper, in Halifax. The headline, “Sheep cull spreads—Britain to slaughter livestock near foot-and-mouth sites” was placed alongside a photo of a pastoral field in Cumbria, England, the foreground entirely filled with dead sheep. Juliusson was haunted by the image of piled carcasses, and by thoughts of their subsequent incineration.

Blanket Sacrifice consists of sixty sheep figures made of salvaged wool blankets, sewn according to a pattern provided by a sheepskin, and stuffed with discarded clothing. The “sheep” are heaped on a platform. The presence of a wooden dolly suggests a transfer to and from a great source of carcasses somewhere out of view.

Juliusson’s decision to work with sheep forms stems from their position in historical and contemporary Icelandic identity—icons for continued survival of an isolated nation—but there is further depth within this choice, given the species’ role as surrogate for humans in the history of ritual sacrifice. Juliusson considers these images to be profoundly connected to the collective history of humanity, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to “images of piled up carcasses and images of piled up human remains taken during the Holocaust and other more recent genocides.”

Svava is a graduate of NSCAD University, and currently lives in Toronto.

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Svava Thordis Juliusson, Blanket Sacrifice       


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