The title of inescapable shelter conjures up the contradictory notion of both an inescapable need for shelter and a shelter from which one seeks, in vain, to escape: in other words, a prison. Mary-Anne Wensley has built a structure in a gallery space, large enough for a person to enter, out of handmade "bricks" made of pig intestine. She forms these delicate, translucent membranes – both beautiful and faintly repulsive – into flowers, net-like curtains and rectangular bricks from which she constructs a "safe house." This flimsiest of materials raises the possibility that it is flesh itself in which we are inescapably sheltered and imprisoned. It is far too fragile to provide any kind of safety, a paradox that is alternately comical and pathetic. Like the material from which it is made, the work embodies a contradiction, suggesting (among other things) the anxiety of women seeking refuge from a pervasive misogynistic violence. This full-colour exhibition brochure features an essay by noted Winnipeg writer and independent curator, Sigrid Dahle, as well as a text by the exhibition's curator, Robin Metcalfe.

Robin Metcalfe has a prenatal affinity for Nova Scotia crafts — his mother met his father while she was teaching weaving in Glace Bay. Like most of the people profiled in Studio Rally, he is a self-employed cultural producer — a freelance writer and independent curator.

Robin Metcalfe's profile page