Searching for Home: the Many Lives of Lucy Maud Montgomery
An Exhibit at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre — October, 2008 to January, 2009
Secrets
LMM was a highly accomplished quilter and embroiderer.
Other long hidden secrets of Montgomery's life and work are exposed throughout the course of the exhibit. It is a little known fact that she was an avid amateur photographer and carried images of her cherished Prince Edward Island with her throughout her life.
An early, rather risqué photo depicts the author in a sensual diaphanous gown in a romantic seaside location — not unlike those alluded to in the rich and textured nineteenth century literature in which she immersed herself. The juxtaposition of such images with those taken of Montgomery in later life as the wife of a rural church minister intrigue the observer and create tension between the imagined and the real, a theme that is never far from the surface of the exhibit.