Remembering Gathie Falk, Canadian artist whose singular practice sparked comparisons to Surrealism and Pop art

"I feel that unless you know your own sidewalk really intimately, you're never going to be able to look at the pyramids and find out what they're about."

"My idea was to do the things in my head,"

"They were all experiments, but it was just to make the things in my mind that were visually and emotionally strong."

Gathie Falk died at her home in Vancouver on 22 December at age 97. Her practice spanned six decades and encompassed Surrealist-leaning paintings, hand-fashioned ceramics, sculptural installations, and performance. She transformed ordinary objects into jewel-like artworks, making glazed ceramic apples, cabbages, rows of shoes, the Picnics series, and a Ford filled with ceramic watermelons. Cement With Poppies (1982) depicted poppies around her 1920s Craftsman house. She described a "veneration of the ordinary" and made pyramids from ceramic fruits inspired by a local greengrocer. Born in rural Manitoba in 1928 to Mennonite parents who fled persecution, she grew up in poverty and resourcefulness.

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