Wendy Coburn once laughingly told me she wanted me to write her eulogy. It is with unspeakable sadness that I’m trying to find words. Far, far too early.
The artist, activist and assistant professor at OCAD died last Monday, June 15.
The challenge in describing how Wendy and her art touched our lives, our community and this planet is that there are too many words and yet too few to capture it. Capture her. But I know that many of us will try.
Wendy’s bright, incisive, wonder-full, uncontainable passions bounded among the spectacular and mysterious natural world, her family, her many dear friends, her wire-haired fox terrier, outrage at injustice whenever she spotted it, a hill of wild leeks. She was astounded, awed, enthralled and saddened by the world around her.
She seized life, turned it upside down, examined it from all sides and gave it back to us as art. That may sound like a frenetic pursuit, but it never was. There was a still gentleness about her, a serenity even through loss and hardship. She moved consciously, deliberately, intentionally and lovingly through her life, and through ours. I never heard Wendy yell or raise her voice, except when she was faced with injustice. Then she’d get up in someone’s face to confront it with little concern for her own safety.
There are many people far more qualified than I am who will speak – for years to come, I hope – about the depth and meaning of Wendy’s work in photography sculpture, video and installation, her explorations of love, emotional connection, race, whiteness, queerness, animal-human relations, errors in health care, to name just a few. She brought humour, irreverence, playfulness and a profound seriousness to all her subjects.
But Wendy the artist could not be separated from Wendy the friend, the teacher, the sister. She approached all her many relationships with care, commitment, abounding love and generosity. That cannot be said of many people.
In our conversations over the years about what was wrong and what was right with this world, Wendy always questioned whether her art made a difference. She pondered doing something more pragmatic, more helpful, more activist.
The world would have been a murkier, uglier place without her. Change begins and continues by drawing our attention to the need for it. You changed things, Wendy, with your ceaseless and painstakingly beautiful calls to attention and to action.
Wendy’s last show, Anatomy of A Protest, was an aesthetic and politically stunning piece of work. It dug deep into the critical role of protest, government tactics to undermine social justice organizing, and the way in which the state and those charged with our protection are complicit in violence against women and vulnerable people. The answers Wendy unearthed left her heartbroken.
Some people are too magical, too fragile, too strong, too filled with the greatest of hopes for life and for humanity, too shattered by their grotesque failings.
In the greatest and smallest of ways, we will miss you, Wendy Coburn. I will miss you more than I can ever say.
Funeral services take place Tuesday (June 23) at Turner & Porter funeral home, 2180 Hurontario, Mississauga. Visitation 6 pm, memorial 7:30 pm.
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