Ethel: Bloodline  2000 
Public Spaces / Private Places (performance series)
Curated by Paul Couillard for FADO Performance Art Centre, Toronto
Photo Credit: Shannon Cochrane 

On a lovely late summer afternoon, I crossed the bridge from Queen Street West to the landmark Palais Royale. It took me a while to find Louise Liliefeldt; the music directed me. What I was hearing was not intrinsic to the park lands, it was actually a recording of Liliefeldt’s father playing standards and traditional hymns. Facing the water, there was Liliefeldt with a cross on her back. The bloodline of Ethel (the artist’s middle name) contributed to the burden she carried on her back. Liliefeldt has created an amazing history of performances in which stasis is a crucial component of the presentation.

In Ethel: Bloodline Liliefeldt interacts socially with a familiar and unfamiliar public. She not only talks to them but asks them for assistance in holding up the cross, and she is characteristically charming about it all. Yet it seems there were offended pedestrians –something about blasphemy. Ethel: Bloodline suggests immigrant trajectories and family histories and childhood ghosts, even representational issues concerning the Christ-figure, while remaining informal, conversational, and striking.

~ LOLA / Winter 2000-2001 article by Andrew J. Paterson.