Liz Pead on finding community harmony, talking with the other, and being a maker

Lunch with Roderick Benns: Conversations with interesting people in Kawartha Lakes

Liz Pead was on her way to the 2019 Kawartha Yarn and Fibre Festival when she found herself lost on Oak Street in Fenelon Falls — and now she lives there.

It’s a quick and punchy narrative and it’s clear she’s told it many times. That doesn’t mean I like it any less.

While trying to get to her solo show at the Colborne Street Gallery, she parked in front of 42 Oak Street, which was for sale, thinking to herself “how insane” the Toronto studio prices were where she was living and how lovely this little village was.

Pead, 49, has long grey hair and captivating red glasses that precisely match her lively personality. We’re in the Olympia Restaurant in Lindsay — a first-time visit to the establishment for her.

“I literally stopped the car because a little voice said to me, ‘You can stop looking now, you’re home,’” Pead says, finishing off her Oak Street origin story. “I put in an offer on that house,” which didn’t work out, and so she ended up buying the house across the street.

Liz Pead operates Liz Pead Studio. (A bit on the nose but it has a nice resonance.) She tells me that professionally she calls herself a maker, given how diverse her interests and talents are.

“I make stuff. I’m a maker. Artist, weaver, craftsperson — a maker of objects,” she explains. “I teach art, I teach craft and I teach design. I see it as a synthesis or hybrid.”

Pead doesn’t want to be nailed down to being one thing, despite such unsolicited advice from the Terry O’Reilly wannabes of the world. Whether it’s making tie-dyed T-shirts for Pride Week, teaching at the Haliburton School of Art + Design, or sitting in her kayak beneath a waterfall and painting the cliffs, she wants to be immersed in all of it.

We both order a Greek salad — mine with a chicken breast on top and hers with a skewer of chicken. As someone who used to work in a top-notch Greek restaurant years ago, she is taking in the entire Olympia menu, comparing and contrasting with her past experiences.

While she lived in Toronto for 23 years before getting lost in Fenelon, she’s actually a New Brunswick transplant.

“Growing up in New Brunswick, I don’t know how I just did 23 years in Toronto. I keep joking that I’d get less for manslaughter,” Pead says.

Pead was raised in Fredericton and attend the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, as it’s known today. She also lived for five or six years in St. Andrews by-the-Sea, a town on the Maine border known for its British sensibilities, well-heeled residents and flourishing artisans.

Eventually Pead found herself visiting friends in both Montreal and Toronto and ended up staying in the latter to do her hard time, finding a job at a Toronto gallery.

But it wasn’t all penitential in spirit during her two decades in Hogtown. After all, she lived in an intellectually stimulating area — just two blocks from the Royal Ontario Museum and with Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Saul as neighbours. Not a bad sentence to serve.

She studied painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design, adding to her surfeit of artistic skills, and operated her Toronto studio with much success.

Lately from her studio in Fenelon, though, she’s been working on the most Canadian thing possible — creating landscapes out of hockey gear.

“My work is very much about patriotism and identity as a community. It’s high culture, like Group of Seven, meeting low culture (hockey) — and to me those things are intertwined.”

Pead doesn’t mean low culture as a negative, either. How could she, considering she’s a hockey mom. And she’s not even the kind of hockey mom that the term implies — she’s a goalie herself.

“Girl goalie for rent!” she jokes, only she isn’t really. She’s a former rec league player and I get the sense she’s ready to step between the pipes as soon as possible this fall if there are any takers.

Pead has two kids — her older boy is a third-year Queen’s University student studying sociology and is a goalie like his mom. Her younger boy is going into Grade 10 and plays double-A hockey.

Loss of Meaning

As a maker, Pead finds it fascinating to consider the ideas of philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Byung-Chul Han, both of whom believe that objects have lost their true meaning.

“We’ve lost that sense of the other,” says Pead. “We have this perfect, smooth world where everything is contained in a box like, say, a perfect Instagram post.”

But in place like Fenelon Falls, says Pead, that perfect and smooth world doesn’t exist. “You have characters. You have individuals — there’s a million ‘others’ here in places like this.”

In fact, Byung-Chul Han — a Korean-German philosopher, takes this one on squarely when he writes in his new book Undinge (German for non-objects).

“Today we chase after information, without gaining knowledge,” Han writes. “We take note of everything, without gaining insight. We communicate constantly, without participating in a community. We save masses of data, without keeping track of memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering others.”

Pead says, for example, “If you’re a bright orange NDPer, your neighbours are most probably different. There are people of every kind here. Frankly I don’t care what political stripe they are; I just want to help our community.

“So living in harmony in a community with that (reality), to me, in some ways is more important at this moment in history than it has ever been.”

Pead says partisan politics might be attractive and it’s always interesting to find allies. “But respectful discussion and hearing others’ viewpoints is better.”

I ask her what the idea of being progressive means to her.

“I think in all things we need to get ‘progressive’ back and I think the left is just as guilty as the right. It’s blindness to our own flaws. Without respectful discussion you can’t see yourself in that mirror and instead you get yourself described back to you — the ‘other.’”

Returning to arts and culture, Pead says she’d like to see a robust Kawartha cultural corridor that would at least encompass Kawartha Lakes and Peterborough County. In five to 10 years, she envisions more cultural-based industries located here. She says that means supporting what we have, like the Arts and Heritage Trail, and building more arts and culture attractions and things to do.

“We need everyone to be lifted up to do better,” says Pead, who would also like to see a smoothly operating website app with a user-friendly interface that would allow arts and culture businesses to create the story of their place. “Creating and selling a story about where you are and how you got there is critical,” she says.

Pead stabs an olive and praises her salad. “So good! And I’m picky about Greek food.”

She finishes off her second coffee and then orders a cappuccino to top off her lunch.

Discovering Fenelon Falls has meant a lot to this maker. “I think I’ve had the chance to make some really good friends here. I’m not sure I could have done this in Toronto — this is different and more meaningful and I feel like what I do matters more in this place — and I care more about it.”

Pead is realizing that small-town life is the best of everything.

“I feel like every day I’m living in a Louise Penny novel in Three Pines. I haven’t figured out which character I am yet. I don’t want to be Clara,” she says with a laugh, “but I’m afraid I might be.” (Clara Morrow is an artist living in Three Pines in the book series.)

Whatever led Pead to get lost on Oak Street in 2019 is still the force that animates her.

“I know I have to work with everybody in the community to build better.”