The exhibition A Bed is a Boat consists of three elements — blue and black woolen quilts, wall-sized line drawings, made with a brush and based on those of young children, and excerpts from poetry and folk lullabies.

As an installation, A Bed is a Boat is an indivisible whole in which the quilts moor and interact with enlarged wall drawings and poems. The work blurs the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, the passage between conscious and unconscious. The installation creates a place where meanings are uncertain — where a boat can be a moon or a bed, a cradle or a grave.

Read Peter White, “Between a Rescuing Coast and a Drifting Boat,” in A Bed is a Boat, An installation of quilts and drawings by Barbara Todd. Cambridge, Ont., The Library & Gallery, 1997.

Read Nancy Tousley, “Rewind: Barbara Todd: Dream Boats,” Canadian Art 15/3 (Fall, 1998): 88.

Read James Trilling, “Epilogue”, from Ornament: A Modern Perspective, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2003, pp. 228-231.