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paula-horizonal-chair-2_web — Paula Lishman at GCAC

Paula Lishman brings Canadian Fur Heritage to Sutton

July 18, 2024

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By Angie Sullivan

Paula Lishman’s unique work with fur has been gracing runways and challenging fashion’s status quo for 50 years.

The Georgina Centre for Arts and Culture is featuring ‘The Paula Lishman Solo Exhibition’ from July 18- September 1.

Canadian fashion icon Paula Lishman is known internationally, with singer Barbara Streisand owning a dozen of Lishman’s trademark fur jackets in every colour.

Also featured in the exhibition is a rocking chair designed by her deceased inventor/sculptor husband William Lishman, whose life story inspired the 1996 movie Fly Away Home about a flock of orphaned Canada Geese led south in an ultralight plane.

Paula Lishman explained the chair’s unusual design with a smile. “Bill was too lazy to lift his pencil off the paper when he drew the rocking chair, and he drew a teardrop shape which he made into 3D.”

Best known for her unique method of knitting fur, Lishman said, “I was raised in Goose Bay, Labrador where fur was worn against the skin to keep one warm. When I’d worked out a way to make a knit fabric with fur on both sides, that was the EUREKA moment!”

Lishman also attributed her creativity with clothes to being over six feet tall. “It was very hard to find anything to fit me, so I made my own clothes from what I had on hand.”

The gallery features the very first deerskin dress she ever created. Lishman said it was made by “draping the pelts, then cutting the scrap pieces into a narrow thread so I could make them any shape I wanted.”

Her second self-designed dress was tie-dyed pigskin with knit lamb inserts. The jewel of the exhibition is a multi-pelt cream creation that would sell for over $10,000. Lishman described it as “mostly woven sheared beaver with white fox hem and top collar. It has a pelted sheared beaver petticoat trim at the hem. The yoke and sleeve bands are woven lambskin with eyelash of fox held with a strip of seal.”

Lishman said, “My husband was called Father Goose and I was the Beaver Weaver.”

Some of Lishman’s creations are being sold at the gallery, and she confided to this reporter that her lightweight fur shawl is her favorite item.