Marilyn Jones | Emily Carr Chronicler

Before the Totems: Emily & Alice in Alaska 1907

Published: 5 September, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

In the summer of 1907, Emily Carr and her sister Alice set out on an adventurous three week holiday to Alaska—a journey that would have a major impact on Emily’s life and art. The pair left from Seattle on August 18th, 1907, on the cruise ship ‘S.S. Princess Royal’ This would be Carr’s first direct encounter with the Indigenous villages of the Northwest Coast, and it played a formative role in the development of…

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Emily Carr & the Fruits of Her Pottery Years

Published: 3 September, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

When one thinks of Emily Carr, images of towering British Columbia forests, brooding skies, and bold totem poles rendered in expressive brushwork come to mind. But nestled between her early frustrations as a painter and her later recognition as a major Canadian modernist lies a lesser-known, yet deeply telling chapter in her creative life: her pottery work from 1925 to 1932. This short-lived career in ceramics, born of financial desperation and simmering artistic tension,…

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Emily Carr & Something Plus in a Work of Art

Published: 28 August, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

On October 1935, Emily Carr stood before the students and faculty at Victoria’s Normal School, delivering her speech “Something Plus in a Work of Art.” She confessed in her journal that she had spent a week preparing and, despite feeling steady rather than nervous, she felt the audience of “young things” received her warmly—far more enthusiastically than the trio of “set‑stiff” professors. Read more: Before the Totems: Emily & Alice…

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