Sister’s scissors know no barriers

19 December 2016

Two minutes for a profile? Sister Theresa is getting faster and faster. A piece of black paper, a pair of scissors, and before you know what’s happening she has a dead-on likeness of you, or Trudeau, or herself, or the little boy in the front row.

By Viveca Ohm

Sister Theresa is an artist, a quick portraitist in the old art of the silhouette. She’s also a diminutive French-Canadian nun of a missionary order, a first-grade teacher at Blessed Sacrament School, and a warmly enthusiastic person.

But that’s not the order in which she prefers her vital statistics to be listed; she insists on a different and very specific ordre. “I’m a woman, a religious, a missionary, an educator, and then an artist. The first three are very important to me.” But she readily agrees that seeing everything with an artist’s eye helps her to fulfill all the other parts […]

(The Precursor, Vol. XXX, July-August 1972, p. 127)