We are saddened to learn of Audrey Capel Doray’s passing on 11 April 2025 at Shuswap Lake Hospital, and we share our very best thoughts with her family and friends.

Audrey Capel Doray (1931-2025) was a major figure in the Vancouver art scene from the 1960s onwards, and her work in painting, drawing, printmaking, electronic art and sculpture has been acknowledged widely for its social criticism and investigation into pop art and feminist archetypes. She treated new media with the care and rigorous attention she brought to her process as a painter and master printmaker. Doray was an important proponent of the particularly Canadian optimism around communication technology that was associated with Marshall McLuhan’s writing and thought, engaging with experiments in new media, interactive and kinetic art and electronic communications that managed to set technology and nature in a harmonious relationship, mixing an investigation of new media with West coast ecological concerns. She and her late husband, Victor Doray (1930-2007), were community leaders in the 1960s Vancouver art scene, particularly through their involvement in Intermedia and its utopian spirit of experimentation and collaboration, embodying a particularly intellectual and cultural stance.

The Belkin is fortunate to have many of Doray’s works in our permanent collection, including Electronic Seascape (1969), her last and most ambitious multimedia sculpture. This work incorporates moving light and ambient sound by Hildegard Westerkamp, with abstract, psychedelic images of the ocean shore using a computer built and programmed by Bob Mills, surely one of the earliest pieces of Canadian art to incorporate such technology. Critics received it rapturously in the 1960s as a work of uncommon beauty and lyricism; Joan Lowndes remarked that the work captures a “wondering rediscovery of the forms and rhythms of nature” (1969). In its sensibility to form, composition and lyrical line alongside its technological innovation, Electronic Seascape offers a holistic vision of nature and new technology in utopian harmony, an ideal for which Doray was so renowned.

Watch a 2008 interview with Audrey Capel Doray

Audrey Capel Doray received a BFA from McGill University and went on to study at Atelier 17 in Paris and at the Central School of Art in London. After moving to Vancouver in 1957, Doray taught at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University) from 1959 to 1961. In 1962, Doray joined Alvin Balkind and Abrahan Rogatnick’s New Design Gallery, an influential art space that presented live theatre, visual art, films, concerts, lectures and poetry readings. Doray has been the recipient of four Canada Council Awards. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections both internationally and nationally, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Tate Modern in London.

We will miss Audrey deeply and feel honoured to have spent time with her curious spirit.

Image (above): Audrey Capel Doray, Hieroglyphic Man II, I and III, all 1965. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gift of the artist, 2018. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography