BGM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-01-25 published
Mary Elinor
POCOCK
By Kate POCOCK,
Tuesday,
January 25, 2005 - Page A18
Artist, photographer, metalworker, teacher. Born August 12, 1952,
in Ottawa. Died September 3, 2004 in Toronto, of breast cancer,
aged 52.
Even as a child, Mary viewed the world with imagination. While
digging with sand shovels, she would be looking at her surroundings
through the hole in the handle. When visiting Montreal's Expo
67, Mary created sandstone sculptures for the Youth Pavilion.
As a teenager, Mary worked summers for the Department of Indian
Affairs, tagging First Nations artifacts and decorating the showroom.
Her bosses must have recognized her design sense, too, because
a year later, they flew her to New York to research and photograph
native crafts at two museums there.
In the early 1970s, she took that research to First Nations reserves
across Alberta to teach traditional Cree and Ojibwa designs and
publish a series of booklets. She was impressed that the Ojibwa
had no word for "goodbye," for she too hated saying goodbye to
almost anyone she met.
The second of seven children, Mary left her boisterous family
to study metal and jewellery at Sheridan College and philosophy
at Boston University, where she had her first photo exhibition.
Returning to Canada, she became resident metalsmith at Toronto's
Harbourfront Craft Studios and worked as a custom colour technician
at BGM photo lab and Toronto Image Works. There, she met her
husband, fellow photographer Marcus
SCHUBERT. In 1989, after
a wedding ceremony where she wore green and purple and her five
flower-girl nieces wore white, Marcus took Mary and her camera
on a 10-month honeymoon through Europe and North Africa in a
Volkswagen camper. It was the first of their collaborative efforts,
a journey that inspired many of her ethereal photographs. "Not
the Material Girl," said brother Philip at her funeral, "but
our Ethereal Girl."
Mary was teaching every second that she was alive. She taught
art to pre-schoolers, school kids, and special education students
at summer arts schools and at museums. She became a certified
yoga instructor in California and combined it with art therapy
for cancer patients. She instructed teachers on how to teach
art and, at the end of her life, she taught hospice workers and
nurses how to treat the dying. Even at her weakest, she worked
on her illustrated cancer journals, the Pocock Diaries, so that
they might inspire others.
Throughout her 11-year engagement with cancer, Mary relied on
humour, her Buddhist philosophies and the natural flow of nature
and life. The powerful link between creation and healing was
nowhere more evident than in her photographs, mystical images
of gardens or superimposed photos of ever-changing nature against
permanent historic structures. Her greatest legacy, perhaps,
is the 22 transparent photographic panels installed into patient
windows at the new palliative care ward at Princess Margaret
Hospital in Toronto. At night, when the hallway lights are on,
her photographs glow like stained glass. Elizabeth
DOUGHERTY,
a hospital social worker, summed it up best when she wrote that
Mary "walked in peace, died in peace and left peace behind. Her
images," she added, "contribute to the kindest gift she could
give to another person -- a happy, peaceful death."
Mary loved great beginnings and great endings. She requested
a plain pine box so mourners could paint and draw on her coffin.
The visitation room was set up as an art gallery. Her photos
hung on the walls, her sketchbooks of poetry were open so visitors
could add to them. A table was filled with pastels, crayons and
markers. As dozens of Friends and family painted scenes of nature,
blessings and messages of thanks, one of her nephews painted
"Fun!" on the casket. It was an unusual tribute for a funeral
but one that Mary would have appreciated.
Kate POCOCK is Mary's sister.
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