• Stanzie Tooth’s Inheritance is on display at the Latcham Art Centre through Saturday, July 12.
  • The exhibition features ink paintings that blend human figures into dense botanical landscapes.
  • Tooth’s work explores themes of ecology, motherhood, and humans’ impact and connection to the land.
  • Her work also offers a personal reflection on what future generations stand to inherit.
  • The Latcham Art Centre is located inside the Leisure Centre at 2 Park Drive.

 

Works by Toronto artist Stanzie Tooth are currently on display at the Latcham Art Centre, offering a quiet yet immersive look at the human connection to the natural world. The exhibition, titled Inheritance, features ink paintings that layer human figures into dense botanical landscapes—drawing attention to both the beauty of the land and the impact of human presence.

“In many of the works, the figures are engulfed in leaves and foliage, but they’re drained of colour. It’s this attempt to show this kind of complicated relationship with the land,” Tooth said in a Latcham interview. “I want to capture its beauty, I want to show that I’m connected to it, but also show the impact that we are having… that we are like a draining presence on the landscape.”

Tooth spent over a decade working in oil before discovering ink while living in Germany, a country with a rich history of ink-making. What began as experimentation soon became a defining shift in her practice. After returning to Toronto and becoming a parent, she embraced inks as a less toxic alternative to oil paints.

“I’ve always been an artist that’s really interested in colour, what you can do with mixing colours, contrasting colours, and that’s another thing that really drew me to ink,” she said. “There is more of a link between the materials and the imagery, like the natural imagery that I’m working with, because a lot of the inks that I’m using are derived from plant materials, from different rocks.”

The exhibition’s title, Inheritance, reflects overlapping themes in her work, including artistic traditions, personal biography, ecological responsibility, and motherhood. “The word inheritance as a title is interesting because it has so many different kinds of levels and implications to the work,” Tooth said. “There is also this level of the world that my child will inherit from me.”

“As I became a parent, this idea of thinking about landscape and the implications of what I’ll pass down to my son makes it even that much more complicated, because of the impact we have on the earth and what we pass down to our children,” she added.

Tooth gave birth to her son in May 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In a time marked by isolation and uncertainty, painting became her nightly ritual after putting her son to bed. She also found solace at her parents’ woodland property, where a return to nature helped to further shape a new body of work that leans more heavily on figurative and representational imagery.

“I just really wanted to dive deeper into the representational. These very kind of explicit images of babies and mothers, and these archetypal Madonna and Child images came out in the work,” she explained. “It just felt refreshing to give myself permission and not feel like I had to kind of hide it under layers of abstraction.”

A longtime admirer of the Group of Seven, Tooth notes that while their landscapes evoke awe, they often lack human presence. That presence is something she feels compelled to include in her own work to reinforce humans’ interconnectedness with the land.

“The ambiguity of the characters is definitely something that is intentional… They’re both connected and disconnected, natural and unnatural, within the space,” Tooth said. “I think that’s important because of the way we exist in the world. We set ourselves apart from nature like we are of nature, but we’re destroying nature. That kind of push and pull is important for me.”

Inheritance runs until Saturday, July 12, in the Latcham Art Centre’s gallery space inside the Leisure Centre at 2 Park Drive.