“The Weight of Silk” Solo Exhibit by Yvonne DuBourdieu

“The Weight of Silk” is a solo exhibition by Alberta artist Yvonne DuBourdieu. In the exhibit, viewers will encounter dreamy evocative paintings that explore a tenderness and longing which tethers us to our cultural, historical and contemporary sense of womanhood. 

Yvonne’s work often explores the shifting terrain between memory and lived experience through themes of belonging, migration and womanhood. In 2020, the uncertainty of a rapidly changing world prompted a shift in the paintings’ emotional landscape. The subjects became increasingly vulnerable and fragmented, occupying states of falling, floating, rising or simply suspended, that echoed the broader sense of instability, displacement and loss. Then, as we emerged into a new altered way of being and life settled into a new rhythm, the paintings began, gradually, to reflect a cautious sense of optimism.

Created over several years, the works in this exhibition reveal evolving emotional currents while maintaining a consistent language of painterly mark-making and layered visual symbolism. The paintings suggest that memory is never static; it is continually reshaped by distance, displacement, and the passage of time. In this way, the work speaks to broader questions of what it means to carry one interior landscape within another, and how cultural histories continue to shape our contemporary experience.

Yvonne grew up in a small village in Stirlingshire in the industrial central belt of Scotland. She spent most of her young adult life in Glasgow, where she studied photography at the Glasgow College of Building and Printing, and drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art before moving to Edmonton in 1990. She graduated with distinction from the U of A extension fine art program in 2016. Her previous work as a documentary filmmaker has informed her studio practice with a strong sense of emotional and atmospheric narrative.

Yvonne has spent much of her life negotiating the fertile space between cultures. Yet migration, in her work, is never treated simply as biography. Instead, it becomes a lens through which larger questions emerge: How does memory shape identity? What remains of home after decades away? Can longing become a creative force rather than a condition of loss?

Longing is the emotional current that flows beneath much of Yvonne’s work. Yet it is a longing that refuses sentimentality. It is not simply nostalgia for Scotland, nor solely an expression of displacement. Instead, she presents longing as a universal condition—one that connects memory with hope, absence with imagination, and the individual with collective experience. Her paintings suggest that identity is not secured through certainty but continually reshaped through movement, change and remembrance.

Yvonne is influenced by contemporary artists like Perter Doig, Mama Anderson and Hurvin Anderson, and is inspired by historical artists from the 19th Century, particularly women artists from the pre-raphaelite sisterhood, Scottish Nasmyth sisters and the Glasgow Girls.

She lives in Calgary.

The Weight of Silk runs from November 1, 2026 to January 29, 2027 at the Red Brick Common Public Art Gallery. 5411-51 Street, Stony Plain, AB T7Z 1X7. 

Hours: Monday - Friday, 11:00am - 4:00 pm

For more information visit redbrickcommon.ca/art-gallery/exhibit-schedule