Bright colours and hues. Faceless figures with loose, flowing limbs, their bodies rendered with almost childlike simplicity. Vibrant outlines around people and objects that force images outward rather than allowing them to recede into the background—a flat, two-dimensional approach that is never lacking in emotion or abundance. The result is cohesion, clarity of form without busyness or needless juxtaposing of elements.
At first glance, one might dismiss artist Erica Rutherford’s paintings as simple pop art—adjacent works. A deeper dive reveals many quiet details—personal truths that infused the longtime Prince Edward Island-based trans woman’s approach to craft, from the early days of her career all the way through to her passing in 2008 at age 85, with grace, agency and transparency. To a point.
I admit I was entirely unfamiliar with Rutherford prior to reading Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works, which is the first full biography of the artist. The book is not just a biography, though; it’s also something of an exhibition catalogue detailing—through historical record and collected essays and artwork—the life of the artist and the many paths taken throughout her career: both in terms of the shifting nature of her practice and also with respect to her gender and identity.
An accomplished multi-hyphenate—filmmaker, painter, author, teacher, printmaker—Rutherford’s life was not easy, nor was it straightforward. With this publication, editor Pan Wendt deftly pulls together a concise timeline of Rutherford’s life, relationships—both personal and professional—and practice, with essays from Wendt, curators Ray Cronin and John Geoghegan, gender studies scholar Eva Hayward and film historian Peter Davis, before concluding with an interview with Gail Rutherford—Erica’s final ex-wife and trusted companion. Wendt, a freelance critic and senior curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG) in Charlottetown, P.E.I., was also responsible for putting together the CCAG’s exhibition of Rutherford’s work, which ran until January 2025.
Though the book is more focused on the evolution of Rutherford’s art and its parallels with her gender transition—she underwent gender-affirming surgery in 1976, decades into an already-successful career—it also presents a thorough timeline of events, following her movements from her birth in Edinburgh in 1923 to living in the England, South Africa, Ibiza, the U.S. and then Canada, settling in P.E.I. in 1985, where she would hang her hat for a further 30 years. It tracks the dissolution of her many marriages, the trajectory of her art alongside the education she gained into her own psychology and understanding of gender dysphoria and her eventual decision to live as her authentic self. And it accomplishes all this while providing a plethora of high-quality images of both the artist and her work, which she herself described as originating from her dreams, using the Jungian concept of “split selfhood” in her self-interpretation: “For the artist, selfhood and image were fundamentally intertwined.”
Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works comes at a time when there is renewed interest in the artist’s work, her catalogue having recently been acquired by the Tate Collection in England, not to mention inclusion in the 60th annual Venice Biennale and a Canada-wide tour of her life’s work. But this book is not a strict biography—in fact, several times throughout it makes reference to 1993’s Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford, to further many of its claims and to add valuable context to the artist’s many works, and indeed the many paths she followed. Rather, the publication offers a thematic overview of the artist, the essays within each focusing on different aspects of her life and work: her early experiments with abstraction and design; her distinct faceless approach to self-portraiture; her filmmaking, photography, landscapes and still lives.
Present throughout is Rutherford’s sense of alienation and, relatedly, her propensity for privacy with respect to the deeper and more personal meanings behind her art and also her transition. “It is as if her work as an artist was part of the external world she felt alienated from, part of the false presentation of herself as a man,” Wendt writes in the book’s introductory chapter.
In the first essay, “Erica Rutherford, South Africa, and the Making of African Jim,” Peter Davis delves into Rutherford’s part in the production and making of “the first South African film for a Black audience,” a work that offers up a “picture of Black life that is quite palatable to whites, designed not to cause disquiet…. [that] avoids or softens the harsh realities of urban African life.”
The second essay, “The Diver,” by John Geoghegan, takes a detailed look at a 1968 painting by Rutherford that is emblematic of her struggles, painted at a time in her life where transition took many forms. Geoghegan describes how “Rutherford could eliminate the elements of her body that she felt insecure about, envisioning the woman she was to become.” Admittedly this is somewhat rough phrasing in the present moment, as we know now, through modern trans discourse, that Rutherford was always a woman and her transition simply brought the inner self outward. Geoghegan goes on to write about how “after she publicly transitioned in 1975, Rutherford largely stopped painting herself, as if she didn’t need the self-representations anymore.” The essay continues by discussing a subsequent painting of Rutherford’s, 1977’s The Startled Model, a lithograph produced post-transition in which the artist replicates a previous painting of hers but with a key difference: where before her self-portraits were faceless or obscured, embracing a degree of ambiguity, of anonymity, in this she, for the first time, “depicts herself with a nose and mouth … [presenting] herself not as a blank cipher or sphinx but as a living woman looking out from the picture plane.” This transition in focus, as it were, in some ways feels like a capstone to one portion of Rutherford’s journey—as if through her many different trajectories, she has finally circled around to a definition of herself that feels more three-dimensional and less divided.
In “Erica Rutherford: A Foreigner Everywhere,” Ray Cronin digs into Rutherford’s sense of isolation and the difficulty she encountered finding spaces that felt like home, like she belonged, including during the Second World War when she spent time acting in touring theatre troupes. With respect to Rutherford’s portrayal of “humanity’s ambiguous place in nature,” Cronin writes that Rutherford was comfortable existing in said ambiguity; that she wanted her work to be “open-ended,” like her practice, to provide the audience with an experience that mimicked to some extent what it was like for her in producing the work.
The final essay in the book, “She Want: The Infant Offering,” by Eva Hayward, touches on the inherent “want” of gender dysphoria—what trans people know about ourselves, even when such knowledge cannot be easily or fully articulated, and the impulse we feel to transition—and how this is reflected in Rutherford’s work and its progress throughout her practice. Hayward references a question the artist asks in Nine Lives—“Am I some kind of guinea pig of natural selectivity?”—with respect to the essentializing of trans discourse: “This is the distinction between trans and nontrans: Trans is a refusal of naturalization, but not of want. It is the opposite for nontrans: a refusal of want, but not of naturalization. Assignment, infantile or adult, is damage done.”
Last, the book provides an interview with Gail Rutherford, in which Erica’s ex-wife discusses their early days together and the journey of Erica’s gender exploration. Gail speaks intimately about their time together, including their move to the U.S. and the changes that took place there—artistically, emotionally and within their relationship—before they opted to settle in in P.E.I, where Erica had felt the most at home upon her initial visit to the province in 1970. Despite the dissolution of their marriage, the two remained close companions and cohabitated up to Erica’s death, including her diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2000.
In some of Rutherford’s later work, she presents her womanhood as “a multiplicity of doppelgängers,” through which she was able to approach her personal discord and self-discovery through a variety of representations, some more explicit than others. In essence, for Rutherford, being a woman was “a struggle … but ultimately as an aspiration, a possibility that could finally be realized” once she arrived at a place where she could fully embrace her identity.
Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works takes great effort to portray the complexities that rest beneath the somewhat simplistic techniques at the heart of Rutherford’s image-making, and it does so with care and appreciation for its subject matter, her trials, her journey. Thanks to Wendt’s attention to detail and the inclusion of a variety of voices, each looking at Rutherford’s life and work through a unique lens, the book succeeds as a celebration of Rutherford’s work, and as a document of the challenges she faced. Her very unique path as an artist is represented clearly throughout, her growth evident in her work and in how the different essays each tackle a different aspect of her process, as both artist and trans woman. By combining these essays with the breadth of examples throughout, as well as a detailed chronology of the artist’s life, what could have been a straightforward academic text becomes something more: a detailed history representing a struggle for existence, for acceptance. One that struck me, and may strike other trans individuals, as giving voice to something—the need to transition—that is often difficult to convey in a grounded and accessible way.
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