Susanna Moodie's Cope

6' x 3'.

Hand dyed silk, leaves, photo transfers. Hand sewn.

Susanna Moodie’s Cope was inspired by the English gentlewoman’s experience as an Ontario backwoods settler during the 1830’s. In her book Roughing it in the Bush Moodie wrote about her life first in a shack near Port Hope, then on an uncleared farm north of Peterborough . Margaret Atwood interpreted this account in her volume of poetry The Journals of Susanna Moodie, which evokes both Moodie’s wilderness experience and twentieth century dilemmas. My cope refers to Moodie’s ultimate embrace of the woods that surrounded her Ontario homestead (an area of Canada I know, having attended Trent University in Peterborough) and Atwood’s notion that “At the last judgment we will all be trees.”