Third year at the show for Kitimat-based artist.
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Tannis Seufert found her artistic medium through a tragic circumstance.
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“After my dad became ill with pancreatic cancer, my mom and I were kind of joking around, not in a distasteful way, but we said, ‘Oh, we should do some fluid art with Dad’s ashes.’
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“And I went back into my head after doing some training with a friend — I was a guinea pig for her, she was acting as a life coach — and I said, ‘You know, there’s something in that idea.’”
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Seufert found a way to preserve her father’s ashes — in resin.
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Westcoast Homes
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She was soon working with the liquid material full-time, experimenting with pigments, inks and other colourants.
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“The thing I find most satisfying with resin is how the colour behaves inside the texture of the liquid, because resin has very, very intelligent properties when you learn to work with how it behaves. Which I think is the goal of any person working in a medium. You want to crack the code of that medium.”
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The resulting images — vividly coloured, solid, glossy abstract shapes — proved popular in the small community where she lives, Kitimat, and in nearby Terrace. She was soon booked solid with commissions.
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For the third year in a row, Seufert is bringing her work to the Vancouver Fall Home Show.
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“The first time, I was overwhelmed with how people responded to my work,” she said. “Because I’m in the north, wearing my crusty resin clothes, hanging out with my cats — it’s very unglamorous. And then I go into the limelight and people are like, ‘I have never seen anything like this before.’”
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Seufert cuts and shapes her own hardwood canvases before applying the resin. The images often come to her as a shape as she’s working with the wood.
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“It’s also a quality in how you draw the line on your canvas. Sometimes it has this bone-like texture. Sometimes it’s like a shard.”
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And sometimes she’s inspired by a visit to the store.
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“I’ll go into Windsor Plywood and I’ll find wenge, purpleheart, canarywood, walnut, live-edge maple, and that alone will inspire me to go down a rabbit hole with it. I will often experiment to find the colour conveying a feeling I have.”
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Seufert was born and raised in Saskatchewan before moving to B.C. with her family. She studied fine art in New Zealand and spent over two decades in the fashion industry across New Zealand, Australia and Canada before transitioning fully to studio art.
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“I had gone through textile design, screen printing, photography, silk screening — so many different mediums — and nothing really grabbed my attention until I found resin.”
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She is an avid student of quantum physics and holistic healing and says that both influence her work.
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“Multi-dimensional quantum physics is a very advanced study of energy,” she said. “It’s learning, really, how you function energetically as a person. When you learn how you function, you learn the principles of creation mechanics, the principles of how energy behaves. You connect that with your own intuition and your own knowing. It expands upon everything much more easily, for whatever reason.”
