Audrey Capel Doray
paintings and sculpture from the mid to late 1960s
Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery   

Audrey Capel Doray’s paintings in Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions use a technique that she refers to as “lift-off, as described in a 2008 conversation: “Vortex and this series of work seemed to predict what I was going to be doing even though unbeknownst to me. There seemed to be a sense of movement, a sense of motion quality to it that comes from a ring of scintillating colour that tended to make the images spin. I was using a lift-off technique that I discovered by accident where I took glossy pages of a magazine – this was a time when Life magazine had wonderful images, you could find anything you wanted. The lift off involved putting acrylic on the surface, placing the glossy page on the acrylic and letting it sit, sensing how dry it should become; I wet the paper and the clay surface and the ink printed itself on the surface and I could rub the surface away so I was just left with the image without the page.”

Doray was a pioneer of interactive and multimedia art that incorporated computers, lighting and electronics, working with Glenn Toppings and Bob Mills in her early career. Armoured Lady (1968/2011) is one of a number of sculptural works that Doray made using mannequin forms: “I had initially thought I would do a cast of a body and then, lo and behold, the display units for women’s lingerie were making a conversion from hard clear plastic to Styrofoam so all these became garbage and I collected a lot of them. I decorated the inside of the bust in the same way that I had done Hexagon, using the lift-off technique. Armoured Lady sits on a stand and has an audio component as well, with the two lights on the dress going off and on at approximately a breathing rate. So when the percussion sound happened to hit, the light changed and you connected with the piece; this was happening at random points which was so much better than synchronized, as I had originally planned.”

Over the course of Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions, we will consider works from the Belkin’s permanent collection through the lens of the pandemic world around us, in particular through the words of the artists themselves. Works from the Collection extends these works from the gallery space to the intimacy of the home; to see more of the Belkin’s collection, visit https://collection.belkin.ubc.ca.

Watch the 2008 interview with Audrey Capel Doray

Images (from top): Audrey Capel Doray, The Big Bien (1964); installation images from Stations; Hieroglyphic Man I (1965); News Now (1964); Hieroglyphic Man III (1965); Armoured Lady (1968/2011). Photos: Rachel Topham Photography

The above quotations are from a July 26, 2008 discussion with Audrey Capel Doray and Joan Balzar in conversation with Lorna Brown in conjunction with the exhibition Idyll at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery