pa gur (yv y porthaur?)

 

Print(ed) construction incorporating screenprinting and etching techniques, as well as drawing processes. Three cradled wood panels, with sheet steel bonded to the central panel, fastened together at the back: 59” long, 17” wide, and 11/16” deep (132 x 43 x 1.8cm). 

Continuing with the ‘Prairie Long Poems’ series, this piece is structured on photographs I took during three trips (left to right): Cornwall (2019), Ireland (2011) and to my hometown of Stonewall, Manitoba on the Canadian prairies in 2018.

These three images bring together a pictorial narrative related to some of my origins, a self-portrait of  genetic, geographical and historical threads loosely woofed and warped into my otherwise inexplicable existence. Everybody can do this and many do in different ways; my way in this piece is, on one level, a vague visual foray into the temporal and spatial liminalities of living; on other levels I continue my exploration of boundary zone concepts, choices we make or can't make as individuals which shape our unique perspectives, and the idiotic symmetries we might experience as briefly-aware living entities in space and time. 

When I travel I prefer if possible to walk and to gather images photographically, as opposed to being more stationery and drawing. Over the years I have noticed that visual themes may surface in the photographs, repetitions that may not become obvious until looking through hundreds of photographs from different travels  – certain kinds of structures or compositional elements for example, just images I find interesting in passing, without much more thought put into it at the moment. In this piece, I have brought together three such choices that share a particular visual structure: the architectural element of shelters.

The structure from Cornwall (left) was on a beach near Mousehole, a small village once described by Dylan Thomas as ‘quite the loveliest village in England’, an easy walk along the coast from Penzance. I vaguely recall that the boat inside the shelter was of some archaeological interest, but I haven’t been able to find out anything more about it. It was a striking sculptural assemblage standing alone on a deserted beach. The Trick family originated in Cornwall and Devon, working for generations as mariners and farmers. Although officially part of England, Cornwall and Devon were once parts of the same Celtic language-speaking kingdom and have closer ties to Ireland than to England.  Some of the Cornish Tricks moved to the Cobourg area on Lake Ontario, Canada about the middle of the 19^th Century. Another branch migrated into Wales.

 

The central image is the doorway into St. Aidan’s Cathedral in Enniscorthy, Wexford, Ireland. The sculptures are of the saint to the left and The Virgin Mary to the right. Whatever was involved in introducing Christianity into Ireland, one of the connections made by the Irish Church was clearly the equal, if not greater, importance of the mother/goddess, as was the case in ancient Celtic pantheons. Shrines to Mary can be found by roadways and paths throughout rural Ireland, frequently by springs or locations of local importance which may have had their own ‘pagan’ goddesses for centuries prior to Christianity. In 1798, the indigenous Irish in the County of Wexford rose in rebellion against their oppressive English colonizers. Another branch of my family, the Staples, were farmers near the village of Gorey in Wexford. Choosing to remain as neutral as possible, politically, militarily and religiously before and during the rebellion, battles of which were literally fought on their doorstep, they incurred the suspicions of both sides as to their allegiances. During the dangerous decades after the rebels were brutally defeated and the famines began, the Staples family - patriarch Thomas, matriarch Anne and nine or possibly ten sons - decided their best chance for survival was to take what they could carry and emigrate via ship from Wexford harbour, rather than live in constant fear of being targeted as traitors by one side or the other. The cathedral in nearby Enniscorthy was no doubt a familiar landmark to them. They too settled as farmers near Cobourg, Ontario in 1823. In time, the Tricks and the Staples became related through marriage. My mother’s family’s origins were also Irish, but their footprint in Canada since the late 1800’s was even more obscure. Her grandmother and her father, Liverpool Irish, emigrated to Canada about 1895. The father in that family had 'disappeared at sea' about the time his son was born. That son was killed in World War One when my mother was one year old. I'm lucky to be here at all, let alone in Canada.

The third image is the barn on our family’s farm outside Stonewall, Manitoba. Sometime in the late 19^th or early 20^thCentury, my grandfather Charles Staples Trick brought some Holstein dairy cattle and Clydesdale horses from the Ontario home farm out to Stonewall, north of Winnipeg, where he established a Holstein dairy farm and bred prize cattle and Clydesdale horses for several decades. He was reticent to talk about family history, so to this day I don’t know if he built the barn (which had an ‘Ontario style’ stone foundation according to one person I spoke with), or if it was already on the farm. In any case, I spent a lot of time on that farm and in that barn and loft when young, exploring every corner of it and of the attached shed, where mysterious farm equipment and drawers of tools were kept, harnesses for the Clydesdales hanging neatly on the walls. The farm was sold to a larger dairy in the mid-60's, and it and its rural surroundings are now small acreages. The barn, unused and now locked, is very slowly falling apart. 

The above information would be of minimal interest to most viewers; if, on the other hand, the images together and their visual/material qualities are able to generate some interest on their own, then knowledge of the underlying narrative is of little or no importance. The screenprinting process on cradled wood surfaces allows for a range of material additions, layering, removals (through sanding of printed surfaces for example, to reveal previously printed colours and elements), a mimicry in the creative processes to layers of history, things revealed or events permanently hidden. By mixing a phosphorescent powder to the medium in some of the layering during the printing/drawing processes, I introduced additional elements of imagery that only appear, dream-like, in the dark. The reflective qualities of etched and polished steel, on the other hand, can remain visible and always changing even in minimal light. What may appear at any given moment can change by the next; nothing is fixed. Such is life, eh?

The title is the first line of an anonymous Welsh poem (1100AD?). It translates roughly as 'What man is the gatekeeper?'

Search 'Pa gur' to enter the rabbithole... 😉

un-titled

 

Completed in 2022 (private collection).

Screenprinting and drawing/painting on cradled birch panels, with screenprinted and etched sheet steel bonded to the centre panel. The three panels, printed separately, are then fastened together to create one piece, 17" x 71" x 3/4" (43x180x2cm).

The images in this work were gathered a few years ago on a trip to my friends' cabin on Lillooet Lake near Pemberton in British Columbia. The cabin is completely off the grid, with electricity supplied by a small hydro generator driven by water from a nearby river. The two end panels are images of the river looking upstream and downstream from the point where the water for the generator is diverted into a feeder pipe. The central image depicts the view from their living room across Lillooet Lake. 

As usual with these pieces, each of the original images was cropped into smaller sections, then enlarged to the scale I wanted by making transparencies of each section on a Canon printer in black ink, which were then spliced back together to create a larger transparency, from which I could make a screenprint stencil. Each panel had several of these full-size stencils on individual screens, each of which could be further modified as necessary and printed numerous times to produce the layered results I was trying to achieve. These results were frequently modified between printings by adding layers of thin transparent washes with a paint roller, or sanding areas away to expose colours previously printed, or by drawing into or wiping away the wet ink immediately after printing. The central panel on steel presented different problems. I wanted to stop using etching mordants that posed health risks, namely acids. The solution was to use an Edinburgh Etch for steel, which is ferric chloride plus food-grade citric acid and water in the correct proportions for etching steel (recipes for different types of metal are available on the web). I also wanted to use water-based non-toxic screenprinting ink as the resist for non-etched areas, which worked reasonably well. Even so, the etching process could take hours at a time, but it was definitely a safer route. The screenprinted resist would eventually begin to break down, so it was necessary to clean the steel completely and reprint it several times as the etching proceeded over several days. Etching steel this way tends to create a dark toothy surface, not dissimilar in appearance to an aquatint, but I wanted a lighter surface. The solution for that was to use a mouse sander after the etching was completed to bring out layers of tone, right back to highly polished steel in some areas - not dissimilar to working on a mezzotint plate. As this steel plate was intended to be a one-off for this piece, I am curious to know how it might work as a printing plate for an edition, but that exploration can wait for another day. In collaboration with the friends for whom the piece was intended, I wanted to include some subtle elements of personal history, but we decided to work with elements of the history of the landscape itself.

the text seen under ultraviolet light

The final screenprinting on the two end panels is barely legible under normal light. It is text derived from a document called 'The Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe' which dates from May 10th, 1911. The document describes the ancient relationship of the Lillooet First Nations to their traditional territory which dates back thousands of years before any European contact. It is also a protest to the colonialist government of the time about how their territories - and their people - were being treated badly by the exploitation of settlers. The document was signed by sixteen chiefs representing the various groups who inhabited different areas of the territory. I wanted to show that the land and its history could not be separated, but to also indicate the danger that, as decades go by without any resolution of Indigenous land claims in British Columbia, the historical connection could simply disappear (hence the title of the piece being 'un-titled'). The ink I used to 'imbed' the Declaration onto/into the landscape is only fully visible under ultraviolet light, and even then it's only partially legible. In theory, if the piece is exposed for a period of daylight, the text should become more visible briefly as day turns to night (appearance and disappearance), but most art is not normally exposed to long periods of daylight due to the fading effects of ultraviolet light on ink. So the viewer may be invited to use a handy UV flashlight to get the 'full effect', which is somewhat fitting - needing another source of light to see what should be plainly visible.

I hope that viewers who are able to see the piece in the right light will read the date attached to the document and the place where it was signed by all the chiefs: Spence's Bridge, BC, May 10th 1911. Looking up that place and date on the web will take one almost instantly to the full text of the Declaration and its historical significance, and to current information about the Lillooet  (Lil'wat) First Nations. (https://lillooet.ca/Golden-Miles/Images/GMHfinallorez_Page_04.aspx)

rock boat ice

Completed on 27 August 2016, screenprinting and drawing on birch cradled panel (centre) and 20 gauge sheet steel (also includes acid etching and sandblasting) on the two end panels. The steel is subsequently bonded to birch cradled panels. Each panel is developed individually and the three components are fastened together when complete. Dimensions are 49" long x 17" wide and 3/4" deep (approx 125cm x 43cm x 2cm).


A visitor who 'comes from away' may become vaguely aware, while traveling in rural Newfoundland, of a growing uneasiness, generated perhaps by the vast bog-soaked rock-strewn barrenness of much of the landscape  ('The Barrens') often fading into the mist horizontally and vertically, interspersed with claustrophobic passages of impenetrable scrubby bush ('tuckamore') beneath heavy dripping skies. Add to this all major roads displaying signage about moose/vehicle incidents, the dangers of which are amplified by the very apparent lack of other travelers, between sudden complete immersions into frequent banks of rolling fog. That's when the weather is nice; it can get much worse (and also much better!). The uneasiness may become identified with the sense that one is passing through an utterly different but also utterly indifferent place, where nothing is even remotely familiar or certain, including arrival at one's intended destination; in fact, the occasional sudden appearance of normality is so unusual that it could be mistaken for a dream. As in Irish mythology about the daoine sidhe, is it possible that you've not really driven or walked for a day at all, you've actually just spent an hour with the fairies because this perfectly normal gas station where you seem to have resurfaced out of a fog bank has a calendar inside dated 1954? It is an experience of constantly being on a threshold of certain uncertainty, moving in an amorphous space between points on a map with names like Cow Head and Blow Me Down, wandering in a kind of perpetual boundary zone which seems to epitomize The Uncanny, all surrounded by an ocean that pounds relentlessly at the shores and cliffs. Well, welcome to Newfoundland! The strangest thing is once you get used to it, you won't want to leave...and it may very well turn out that you weren't who you thought you were when you arrived, either.

The Random Passage site, drawing by Linda Bannister

In June 2014 I traveled all around the Bonavista Peninsula. Icebergs were on every horizon, around every corner, grounded in every cove. In the beautifully preserved outport of Trinity I perused a pamphlet about a full scale film set that had been built nearby at Old Bonaventure, about 15 years earlier, for a Canadian/Irish series called Random Passage, a CBC television drama portraying outport life in the early 19th Century. The pamphlet included a drawing of the site by someone named Linda Bannister, which as a drawing instructor I automatically critiqued as being far too dependent on outlining and seeming to lack any tonality or sense of perspective. The set, however, was apparently so faithful in historical details that the Newfoundland government had asked the CBC to leave it intact after the series was completed, and thus the Random Passage Site Society was formed to maintain and operate the location as an educational destination. I visited the next day, and to my chagrin discovered that my tour guide was none other than Linda Bannister the artist herself.

 The Random Passage Site, near Bonaventure, Newfoundland

Worse, or better, it turned out that her too-linear atonal non-perspectival drawing was never intended to be anything but a working plan for a stunningly-coloured hooked rug depicting the Random Passage Site, an activity which she pursued in her spare time, raffling off the beautiful finished works of art to raise funds for the society. Abandoning my west coast artistic pretensions under a nearby rock, I humbly allowed myself to be educated, and not for the last time in Newfoundland either. As it happened, the site included a tiny one-room school house, inside of which were a few pieces of furniture and shelves of books and toys. One shelf held a small model of a gaff-rigged schooner, which was as much a teaching model for future fishermen as a toy for young boys (there were also dolls, as one might expect). But the shelf and boat also struck me, within the context of the whole site, as a metaphor for outport life over hundreds of years: these tiny isolated villages of a few families, completely dependent on what fish they could catch in small boats, living on a thin shelf of rock between scrub spruce rising behind them and the abyss of the sea before them... 

Like the old boys used to say

All you want The Rock for is sleeping

You spend your day out in boat

And you sleep on The Rock.

Random Passage family home

The schoolhouse and homes - at least those of the Irish fisher families - were cobbled together with vertical poles of spruce set in a hard mud floor, chinked against the wind, fog and rain with moss and roofed with sail canvas, bark and/or thatch. A stone hearth, a design that hadn't changed for a thousand years or more, supplied

Daybed in a cottage in Heart's Delight

the cooking fire and the only heat. The image to the left shows a bed by the hearth, an outport tradition that continues to this day with a daybed by the kitchen stove, where someone can come in from the outside cold and damp to catch a nap and a bit of warmth in the only room in the house with heat.

Survival over the winter depended on the quantity and quality of cod caught and processed during the summer, which determined how much credit the families might be able to claim at the fish merchant's store to buy food basics for the winter and the gear necessary to start fishing the next year. Archived documents of the English fish merchants record in one word the fates of those who failed to meet their fish quotas: 'starve'. We often associate the word 'plantation' with the history of slavery in the New World. The plantations established in Newfoundland - and they were called plantations by their English owners - for the purposes of fishing cod were just as much establishments of slave labour as any European plantation along the Eastern seaboard down to the Caribbean and Central and South America. The exact living conditions of the poverty-ridden outport fisher folk are only beginning to be studied within the larger picture of English-Irish conflict, 'plantation' strategies and politics in the 16th to 19th Centuries, a picture which, conveniently for the English colonizers, barely survives today on the Newfoundland landscape, yet continues to have profound effects on the social and economic lives of outport descendants. And so the appearance of the Random Passage Site, an artificial albeit historically accurate construct, speaks to the English-Irish outport history of Newfoundland and Labrador, a journey for the Irish as it were from one form of disappearance and dispossession to another. Like the massive icebergs drifting offshore, sublimely indifferent to the 25,000 years they represent, much of that history will remain out of sight, destined to disappear into the fog or the sea and time itself.

Galway hooker, Dingle, Ireland

The origin of the name 'schooner' is not certain*, but the handling and speed of these sailing ships made them an ideal choice for European and North American sailors and fishers in the 18th to 20th Centuries. The Irish fishers would possibly be familiar with the similar but single-masted Galway hookers, but most of the inshore fishing at outports would be conducted from rowing boats with small crews who could also hoist a single mast and sail when needed, similar in design to those used throughout the Gaelic-speaking islands of Ireland and Scotland. As always, the design would be modified to adapt to the local nature of the North Atlantic and the boat-building materials available, so the heavy curragh of the Aran Islands, for example, with its wave-riding bow eventually metamorphosed into the dory of Newfoundland.

Inscribed but barely legible in the ink of the central panel is a quote by an Aran islander from John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands: 
'...A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again...'.

Seventy years later, Candace Cochrane published the following quote from a bayman in her superb book Outport -The Soul of Newfoundland (also the poem above called Out in Boat):
'...A small boat will never swamp you if it's handled right. I've been out in seas that you'd never believe any small boat could ever live in. You see waves where you have to look straight up at them. If you keep going and head right into them, you're going to get it, but the whole ocean's not breaking like that, eh? You see a wave coming aways off, cut off, cut off, cut off, and tip over the corner of it. You got to understand the sea...'


Sources quoted::
Cochrane, Candace Outport - The Soul of Newfoundland Flanker Press Ltd, St. John's NL 2008

Synge, John Millington The Aran Islands with drawings by Jack Butler Yeats (1907) edition 2008 Serif London

Additional Reading:
McCann, Phillip Island In An Empire - Education, Religion, and Social Life in Newfoundland, 1800 -1855 Boulder Publications, Portugal Cove-St. Philips, Newfoundland and Labrador (2016)

Morgan, Bernice Random Passage Breakwater Books Ltd, St. John's NL 1992

* probably from the Dutch schoon meaning 'clean' and/or 'beautiful', closely related in the sense of the phrase schoon schip maken which means 'to come clean', but which translates literally as 'to make a clean ship', hence schooner. Or at least that's my best guess!