Art is What Makes Life More Interesting Than Art

Kathleen Knowling
The Rooms | July 10 – December 1, 2025

Reviewed by Amanda Marie Hull

Stepping into Art is What Makes Life More Interesting Than Art is like entering Kathleen Knowling’s consciousness, a space at once playful, searching, and defiantly alive. At ninety-seven, Knowling fills her handmade sketchbooks with an energy that moves freely between St. Philip’s and Ancient Greece, Chicago and Pippy Park, the Garden of Eden and her own backyard. The exhibition, now on display at The Rooms in St. John’s, is less a retrospective than an immersion: viewers are invited to peer into the artist’s mind as she threads memory, place, experience, and imagination together without hierarchy or pretence.

What strikes first is the freedom. Knowling’s pages carry unrestrained motion, “freedom of action, freedom of movement,” to quote the artist, a lesson for our times. She appears utterly unapologetic, intrepid in self-revelation. Her art exposes private thought with almost mischievous candor: teapots, dogs, unposed faces, fragments of abstraction and shards of reality. Collage snippets, handwritten notes, small landscapes of loops and fibres. Drawings that wander from classical statuary to the banal intimacy of a banana peel. The sacred and the silly share the same page.

The Newfoundland presence is unmistakable. Blues of every shade ripple through the pages, echoing harbours and ponds. Familiar clapboard houses anchor the work in local vernacular, grounding restless ingenuity in a recognizable geography. Yet from this firm rooting, the artist leaps outward, across centuries, continents, even ontologies. Adam and Eve debate nudity and belly buttons; a Roman lion is frozen in time; a genderless nude stretches across two pages, body one with nature; childhood wonder flares; an old woman dances toward death. Like tides pulling far beyond the bay, these juxtapositions—of life and myth, mortality and play—remain entwined, humorous yet profound.

Poetry heightens the effect. Some lines tease, others pierce: “the crunching of a thousand little jaws,” “the disgrace of a single life.” Words in Knowling’s hands become visual marks, refusing separation from image. They prompt the reader-viewer to pause, to feel language not only as thought but as texture on the page. In this way, she affirms herself as both poet and visual artist.

Materiality matters here. The sketchbooks are worn, pages softened by years of turning, some more than others. Viewers long to flip forward where scattered blue tabs protrude invitingly. Pencil, oilstick, fabric, buttons, shells, brass, and more turns pages into tactile puzzles. Surfaces clash and harmonize; the soft edge of graphite against a hard corner cut-out, layers of meaning against flat paper. These marks of usage, even the wear of time, feel integral, speaking to art not as pristine object, but as living practice.

A strong vein of feminism runs throughout, not as a manifesto but as lived truth. Knowling insists on women’s presence, vitality, and complexity: Eve’s blame and curiosity, the aging female body, sexuality and appearance, the freedom to laugh at the seriousness of art itself. Even the “eyes-shut selfie” asks, am I art? Knowling answers: yes, fearlessly.

Ultimately, the exhibition offers intimacy without sentimentality. To look at these sketchbooks is to step into Knowling’s head, but also to glimpse oneself reflected back—half-memories, stray questions, flickers of recognition. Art is What Makes Life More Interesting Than Art reminds us that art is not a performance of mastery but a practice of being: candid, sensual, and unafraid; brown paper joie de vivre.