In Collaboration with the Dead, artist Nancy Cole engages in a posthumous conversation with her father, Murray Cole, through a series of hand-embroidered photographs. A Royal Canadian Air Force aviator stationed at RCAF Station Grostenquin in northeastern France during the early 1950s, Murray Cole documented his time abroad with a 35mm camera, capturing everyday life during a complex moment in Cold War history. His images depict scenes from post-war France, Morocco, and Algeria shaped by military service and fleeting personal pleasures.
Decades later, Nancy Cole revisits these photographs with needle and thread, printing them on canvas and delicately embroidering their surfaces. Her interventions echo the 19th-century tradition of embellished photographic postcards, where women’s handiwork transformed mass-produced images into valuable keepsakes. Here, the embellishment becomes an act of connection: a way of responding to her father’s gaze, complicating it, and layering it with her own.
“How thin the veneer of civilization is” -General Wayne Eyre Chief of the Defence Staff (retired)
"Furious Putin says West pushing him 'to point of no return' on nuclear WW3" -Mirror 04/06/2024
"Upon uncovering a collection of 35mm slide film after my father's passing, I was transported into a world marked by the palpable tension that defined the Cold War era — a time when the threat of mutually assured annihilation was very real"
During the First World War, homesick soldiers on the front lines sent beautiful silk postcards to their loved ones at home.
Wheels up for one last flight.