Interview with Gail Rutherford: Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works

Over the next few months, we’re in conversation with artists, curators, and others regarding our current exhibitions at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. 

This week, we chat with Gail Rutherford, an artist, illustrator, and teacher about her thoughts and insights on the Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works exhibition. This exhibition is on at the CCAG until January 5^th 2025.  

Showcasing Erica’s tremendous body of work must be a notable and rewarding experience for your family. What is one aspect or detail that you hope visitors take away from this exhibit?  

GR: It’s lovely to see Erica’s life celebrated in this show. We see her early work, influenced by current art trends, then the early days in Ibiza reacting to the beauty and colour of the world around us, and then as her underlying concern with gender dysphoria begins to emerge, the figures begin to appear.  Then when we moved to the States this pressure continued and the self-portraits as a woman evolved, with the solid colour area style that the change to a different continent seemed to trigger. She was exploring who she was, how we appear to others, and the local landscape.  So, the show really is a great example of the inner person expressing more and more openly; in her late years after she physically trans as a woman she played with “feminine “subjects, flowers, interiors,,, and eventually to the world of strange landscapes where creatures neither human or animal seem to tell stories and parables. 

Though Erica is not physically present, her talent and spirit live on through her incredible artwork. As her partner, are there any piece(s) meaningful to your relationship and memories with Erica? 

GR: There isn’t only one work that stands out, they cover so many things and associations, it’s hard to land on just one. 

Erica’s brave decision to live openly as herself was both admirable and far ahead of her time. What advice would Erica (or yourself) give to artists coming from marginalized communities?   

GR: I think she was pushed really hard by her inner struggle, in a world where it was not understood and was really way out of most people’s understanding, particularly in the American mid-west.  I’m sure painting it out enabled her to survive, and it’s why the paintings of that period resonate so strongly for anyone walking the same road.  If there are lessons to be learned it is to try to express yourself truly as you are, which is a lot easier to say than to do.  It’s the real true road for all of us, not only in the arts, to become open and friendly to ourselves, self-acceptation. 

Bio: 

Gail Rutherford AESTC, was born in Australia in 1934 and studied art in Sydney. She started working as a colour consultant for an international paint company. In 1959, she went to London UK and worked for the same company there.  That year, she met Eric Rutherford and moved to Ibiza, Spain, and for the next seven years moved between Ibiza and England, painting, writing and illustrating. Her daughter Susana was born in Madrid in 1966.  Exhibited paintings in Spain and the UK, and after the move to the States in 68 continued to exhibit her work there and also began to teach. She moved to Toronto in 1975 teaching at Ryerson Technical College and continued to exhibit work in Toronto and the Maritimes. She travelled widely and eventually retired to PEI where she joined Erica Rutherford. Although the marriage was dissolved at the time of the gender change, the two continued to be close friends and parents to Susana.