Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works

The Rooms | St. John’s, NL | November 21, 2025 – March 8, 2026

Reviewed by Rhea Rollmann

There’s something telling about the fact Erica Rutherford’s retrospective exhibit at the National Gallery in Ottawa—the first for a PEI artist—took place last year almost two decades after her death. 

Rutherford, who died in 2008, enjoyed a prestigious career as an artist with international recognition but has remained underappreciated in her adoptive home of Canada (born in Edinburgh in 1923, she lived all over the world, and finally settled in Prince Edward Island in 1985). To be an artist from Atlantic Canada is already to be at a disadvantage in this country; to be a trans artist is to exacerbate matters. In art, as in life, Rutherford was very much ahead of her time; we ought to feel fortunate perhaps that time has caught up with her at all. Her exhibit’s second destination is The Rooms, where NL’ers have until March 8 to take in the remarkable experience.

To enter “Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works” is to stroll through a gallery of unfolding wonders; a world that grows in sensory intensity with every step. The first portion of the exhibit, a collection of photographs and printed ephemera, sets a muted tone. The photos belie what is to come but provide important context: they reveal Rutherford at different stages of her life, both before and after her gender transition (a protracted process from the 1950s onward, culminating in legal and medical transition in the 1970s). There is also a sample of her less widely known sculptural work, a medium in which she enjoyed working and received acclaim.

But turn the corner and suddenly you are confronted with an overwhelming burst of colour on enormous canvasses. Colours, shapes, bodies, genders all grapple together in garish chaos. Ambiguous figures curve and twist, coming together in messy ways. They envelop the viewer in a miasma of colour; despite the bold lines and strokes delineating individual figures, the overall impression they evoke is one of blurred boundaries. There’s a charged, androgynous eroticism to these figures, hailing from what has sometimes been referred to as Rutherford’s ‘Pop Art’ period. Sometimes ideas are repeated in altered form: “The Wrestlers” (1968) suggests two women grappling, while “Tokyo Toughies” (1971) offers a more androgynous version of the same. 

During this period Rutherford produced a series of self-portraits—first as the photographs seen at the beginning of the exhibit, then rendered in stylized form on canvas. In “The Mirror” (1970) a woman sits on a bed, leather-booted legs standing out prominently while her upper half melts into amorphous anonymity. In “The Coat” (1970) and “The Crouched Figure” (1972) we see the faceless protagonist in a variety of poses, leather trenchcoat most prominent. “The Diver” (1968) is striking for its size and overall effect; the curves and angles are highly feminized yet the wetsuit and mask render the rest of the figure indiscernible. 

What do we make of the lack of faces in these images? Is the face too specific a signifier? Does it clash with the amorphous, messy ambiguity of these figures’ broad curves and eye-popping colours? Are they intended to represent the potentiality of gender, or to emphasize how unhinged the connection between self, body and gender can often be?

Rutherford struggled with gender dysphoria during this period, grappling with her own internalized fears and doubts (at a time when gender identity was far less well understood) as well as the transmisogyny of the medical professionals she approached. We witness these struggles emerging in her art from the period—those complex bodies full of colour, in which curves grapple with straight lines, voluptuousness with androgyny, wherein the viewer transposes their own ideas onto the blank, faceless heads. If the photographs provide a clearly delineated image of the artist (and her shifting presentation of self) the pop art paintings avoid specificity. Their bodies are outlines, shapes; where they do assume more definitive curves they lack faces. What to make of this deeply gendered ambiguity, which carries an erotic charge for all of its amorphousness? It’s the audacious, bold colour that arouses here, the sense of daring and devil-may-care splashing of the palette. 

One of Rutherford’s final projects was an equally ambitious and challenging set of paintings known as The Human Comedy series, produced from the early 1990s until her death. The Human Comedy shares much with Rutherford’s pop art era, although the styles appear distinct on first glance. But they share that same sense of surreality, of profound strangeness. In the pop art works, the strangeness manifests in a very visceral encounter with shape and colour; it is in their initial impression on the viewer that their power lies. 

By The Human Comedy period, there is a more relaxed quality which nonetheless communicates a similar sense of bemused wonder at the human experience. Here, the visceral impact of faceless, forcefully inscribed bodies has been replaced with a sense of whimsy, depicted in lighter lines and muted, crayon-like colours. Cartoonish characters—their borders equally shaky and uncertain—present as anthropomorphized animal-human hybrids. What are they? What do they mean, and what are they doing? There’s a certain mockery at the human condition implied in these works; at the rituals and roles we take so seriously, yet which appear comedic when enacted by the hybridized protagonists of these paintings. They also communicate transformation; ambiguity; complexity of form and identity, along with a reminder not to take ourselves and the identities we assume too seriously. 

Nestled between Rutherford’s dramatic pop art paintings and The Human Comedy are a series of more gentle images, nonetheless infused with her characteristic intensity of colour and bold line stroke. These paintings depict scenes from her adoptive home in PEI: pastoral scenes, fields and barns, tables full of food and bounty. They’re full of cats, cows, and bucolic pleasure (Rutherford also illustrated children’s books, among them a version of The Owl and the Pussycat, and another titled Yoga and Cats). They provide an interesting, almost whimsical bridge between the stormy, provocative content filling the rest of the gallery. 

There’s a lot to think about in these paintings once one gets over the initial visceral sensory impact of the colours and dramatic shapes and lines. Expressing ideas rooted in Rutherford’s own complex personal history, the complexity of these works, their paradoxical merging of ambiguous boundaries and bold colours and lines, all speak powerfully to our own uncertain present, a moment that is also characterized by stark lines and messy hybridities. 

Atlantic Canada ought rightly to claim Rutherford as our own, and be proud in doing so. Her varied and inspired canvases are a worthy exemplar of a region every bit as dramatic, colourful and daring as the art depicted on these gallery walls.

Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and audio producer based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023).