‘I’ve not stopped working, so this is more of a survey, a continuing body of work,’ says octogenarian who hit headlines with breast sculpture in 1993

In 1993, Marlene Hilton Moore may have been the most well known person in Barrie.

Her massive sculpture, Site Breast — a three-metre, 1,500-pound bronze depicting, well, a woman’s breast — was unveiled on the grounds of the original MacLaren Art Centre at the corner of Wellington and Toronto streets.

The work made her an instant celebrity and launched a career that is still going strong, more than 30 years later.

Now an octogenarian, Hilton Moore is the subject of not one but two exhibitions.

Moments to Monuments – The Public Art of Marlene Hilton Moore, is at the Georgian College Gallery until March 21. Threadlines, which brings together more than three decades of studio work, opened at the MacLaren Art Centre on March 12.

She’s quick to point out that these shows are surveys of her work, not retrospectives.

“The Moments to Monuments show is really only exhibiting six of my 23 commissions, so that’s not a retrospective, per se,” Hilton Moore said during an interview at her Hillsdale home. “And the MacLaren isn’t a retrospective, either, even though it has work from many years of my practice.

“I’ve not stopped working, so this is more of a survey, a continuing body of work,” she added.

Celebrating her public art commissions, the Moments to Monuments exhibit highlights six works that can be found across the province as well as public art submissions that were not selected.

Threadlines brings together more than three decades of studio work and includes textiles, sculpture, photography, drawing and sound.

According to the promotional materials for the Threadlines show, “it’s focused on the studio as a site of inquiry, where labour, touch, and repetition are foundational” and it “reflects a lifelong engagement with process and the history of materials.”

Hilton Moore knows some will get it. Others will not.

“One of the things I understand now in terms of working at my job as an artist, I can only speak to what I know and since I’m interested in a truth, I can only speak about my truth, and it cannot answer to anyone else necessarily,” she says. “The exhibition is called Threadlines and some people will respond, and some people won’t, and all of it is perfect.”

Asked what a viewer would learn about her from seeing Threadlines, HIlton Moore paused while she considered a response.

Looking around the room at the treasure trove of carefully wrapped works that were on their way to the MacLaren for inclusion in the exhibit, she gave the question serious thought.

“They would know a lot about my thinking and feeling process,” she says. “I think one of the things, it’s like a subtext, but it’s always at the forefront of my thinking simultaneously, which is a bit weird, is beauty.

“I think the one thing, whether they would know to name it specifically, but I think they would come out with this underlying sense of the beauty of things, like the light in the photographs or the surface sheen on the Venus figure.”

If a viewer doesn’t get her work, Hilton Moore has no problem talking them through it..

Unlike many artists who refuse to explain their work, Hilton Moore gets great satisfaction from the interaction.

“You have to be generous,” she says. “And you have to assume that somebody that comes up to your work does not have, you know, they don’t have the six months, one year, 10 years of experience that you have had to both physically make the work and all the thought process to put into it, so you can’t expect someone to come up and instantly understand it.

“If somebody is asking me, I’m very willing to answer to try to give them some information. I love to talk about my work.”