Parcelled Shoes for the Long Distance Runner by Betty Roodish Goodwin

Provenance:
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:
Arthur Bardo, “Betty Goodwin's Graphics: Minimum Creates Originals”, Montreal Star, March 25, 1970
Rosemarie L. Tovell, The Prints of Betty Goodwin, Vancouver/Toronto, 2002, pages 10-19, 32-33, 141, illustrated page 140, plate 87, for a hand coloured edition signed out of 2 from the first state

Regarded as one of Canada’s premier contemporary artists, Montreal-born Betty Roodish Goodwin created a body of work that reflected her deep concern with the fragile and ephemeral nature of human experience. Largely self-taught, Goodwin focused on painting and drawing in the late 1940s before turning to printmaking as a primary means of expression in subsequent decades of her career. After enrolling in a course taught by Yves Gaucher at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University in 1968, the artist began refining her technique, incorporating found objects into her innovative soft-ground etchings. Ghostly impressions of vests, gloves, and parcelled garments made on plates placed directly within an etching press, Goodwin’s best-known works from 1970 are not, as a contemporary reviewer noted in the Montreal Star, mere translations of three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional spaces; indeed, they are expressions of “the formal possibilities created by compressing that shallow space.” Haunting and mysterious, Goodwin’s images of disembodied garments incorporate her innovative formal explorations of the medium with her reflections on all too human experiences such as loss, solitude, and mourning.

Like works from her renowned Vest series, Goodwin’s “Parcelled Shoes for the Long Distance Runner” depicts garments as vessels which seem to honour the memory of the body—its presence and its absence—and the passage of time. Rosemarie Tovell discusses how the idea for the print likely originated from the artist’s fascination with a popular photograph of the footprints that astronauts had left in lunar dust during the first moon landing. Created in December 1970, the work is possibly one of three unnumbered black ink proofs pulled before Goodwin began the first state of coloured prints for an exhibition at Gallery Pascal in Toronto in 1971. Wrapping real shoes in paper and pressing them into the soft ground of a zinc plate by running them through the press, Goodwin’s process highlights the artist’s intimacy to things and the things depicted. Like textiles, Goodwin’s printed images function as “second-skins” or intermediaries between human and non-human existence. Speaking about her work in 1970, the artist described how in her practice she sought to illuminate “the inherent gentleness in the intercommunion of oneself with things...in the end, a successful work is the image of our being.”