Ilsė Anysas-Šalkauskas was born to Lithuanian refugees in Germany during WW II. After the war she immigrated to the US with her family, and after marrying a Canadian, moved to Alberta where she resides in Cochrane, overlooking the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Ilse is a visual artist who graduated from the Alberta College of Art (now the “Alberta University of the Arts”) in 1980, having majored in textile art with a minor in printing.
Since graduating she has been interested in a variety of artistic media and has created large and small tapestries and sculptures, working with up-cycled leather, a variety of fabrics, papier mâché and found objects. She cuts, fuses and sews fabric and leather together to build her intricately layered art work. To finish her work she may embellish it with acrylic paint, wool or synthetic yarns, beads and other objects as appropriate, to create complex, one-of-a-kind 2-D and 3-D fibre art collage constructions reflecting various themes.
To quote from the Alberta Craft Council in 2006: “Ilsė Anysas-Šalkauskas is one of the leaders of an Alberta revival and contemporization of fibre arts”. She is known for a series of projects using unconventional materials and techniques to comment on issues of landscape, land use, and environmental preservation. In 2006 her up-cycled leather tapestry, “Rising from the Ashes”, was included in a major Alberta Craft Council exhibition called “All About Alberta”, which travelled to other provinces as well as the US and Korea.
She is an active member of the Alberta Society of Artists and was juried into the ASA as a Full Member in 1983, where she held the position of Membership Chair for three terms. In 2008 she was juried into the Studio Art Quilt Association (US) and has exhibited her art work both nationally and internationally with them.
Her mixed media art work has been exhibited in juried and invitational shows, both nationally and internationally, and has won several awards. Images of her art have been published in Canadian and American books and magazines and her works are in public and private collections in Canada and private collections in the US. Two of her pieces are in the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts in Edmonton, Alberta, and one is in the collection of the Cambridge Art Gallery and Library, Cambridge, Ontario.
In 2009 she and two colleagues received a Canada Council grant which gave them the opportunity to participate in a two week-long Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where they developed a major art exhibition called “Hanging by a Thread”.
In 2018 she was commissioned by the Calgary YWCA to create textile art work for their new YW Calgary Hub facility. The YWCA also borrowed one of her leather tapestries from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to hang in their Board Room.
She taught both children’s and adult art classes for the Alberta College of Art and Design’s Continuing Education Department from 1991 until 2006 when she retired from her teaching career.
Her art is strongly influenced by the Alberta prairie and foothills environment in which she lives. She is fascinated by the way natural and human forces alter and redefine her environment, and creates art to comment on issues of landscape, land use and environmental preservation.
She also creates conceptual art motivated by instinctual responses to family and personally significant life experiences using the materials necessary to express her feelings best.
She investigates and explores the fibre art medium’s boundaries creating a marriage of formal artistic principles with old and new techniques for working with fibres.
“As I was growing up, my mother taught me to be creative with the needle arts. I always loved the colours and tactile properties of textiles, and enjoyed working and creating with them. …
The inspirations for my art come from my life experiences, social concerns and the Alberta landscape that surrounds me. In order to create my work I use a combination of techniques, from drawing, painting, beading, hand embroidery, quilting and my sewing machine. … I am mostly guided by the ideas motivating me and this allows me great freedom in creating my abstract and realistic work.”
Ilse Anysas-Šalkauskas may be a new discovery for Lithuanians in the more easterly parts of Canada, and hopefully there will be opportunities to become more familiar with her unique work.
