The number of items in this collection is around 4500 and represents work made throughout Mary Filer’s lifetime; from art student and nursing school student in the 1940s, to her tenure as a highly respected artist of the 21st century.
The Filer collection was delivered to the University of Regina Archives and Special Collections after a brief trip to Vancouver in October 2019 by University Archivist, Mark Vajcner, and University Librarian, Brett Waytuck. Shortly after this meeting with donor, David Lemon, the first of two shipments arrived, the second shipment arrived in mid-December 2019.
Himself a painter, and lover of music, David Lemon is the founder of Health Arts Society, a society created to bring concerts by professional musicians to seniors living in care-homes. David has been deeply involved in Vancouver’s art galleries, symphony, and opera scenes, and has been ‘giving back’ in this way for many years.
The material for the Archives arrived in 8 heavy wooden ‘oversized’ cabinets, 7 plastic bins, several custom-made boxes of framed paintings and coroplast containers that shipped just under 200 oversized abstract paintings on cardboard and paper.
The plastic bins held a significant number of rolled paintings, prints and posters, all covering a broad variety of subject matter that included society portraits, nude figure studies, lino-cut prints on translucent paper, still-life drawings, and impressionistic landscapes. Several commercial posters from Mary's personal collection were also included in these bins, including a rare set of 10 poster series, "Eyewitness to Space," each depicting artist renderings of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space program in the 1960s.
The collection includes multiple forms of Filer’s work from paintings (framed and unframed) in watercolor and acrylic/oil to twenty-two rolled and taped together sheets of 8.5 x 11 inch. There are drawings in pencil crayon and wax crayon, large-scale timed charcoal drawings made during her days as a student in the 1940s, the paper becoming brittle over the passing decades. It also includes numerous designs and ideas rendered in pen and pencil on dinner napkins and note pads with a great many loose sketches and sketchbooks depicting Mary’s early drawings, while at school and later, of her commissions and projects, both realized and unrealized. Life-size portraits of notable people from Filer's life in the 50s and 60s are present as are several of Filer’s commercial medical drawings and visual records for the planning and execution of many of her paid commissions and personal work including both murals and large scale glass work. Many of her plans and designs were worked out on oversize paper and is indexed on spreadsheets with details, provided by the work itself, as to date, size, and condition as well as a short note on its visual appearance. Mary’s work with lino-cuts is also well represented, a few samples of the linoleum and the lino cut prints made from them are present.
The collection includes approximately 2 metres of textual records including many photographs related to her work and the life she shared with her husband, architect and urban planner, Harold Spence-Sales. Also included in these records are other personal material including 3 artifacts, two sound recordings, certificates, correspondence, publications and publicity material relating to her work.
This collections also includes work by other artists, including printmakers and photographers, notable among them are Claire Trotter, Maki Haku (Maejima Tadaaki), Gertrude Hermes and a suspected Arthur Lismer. This collection ranges in date from 1939 to 2018.
