Completed Christmas 2012. Screenprinting and drawing on three wood panels - the centre one is sheet steel on wood with screenprinting, etching and sandblasting. 65" x 19' x 7/8" - approximately 165cm x 48cm x 2cm. Three images from three boundary areas: on the left, the Lord Kitchener Memorial near Marwick Head, Orkney (it's the tower in the distance). On the right, the edge of a campground near Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta. In the centre, a 'Galway Hooker' in a window somewhere in the west of Ireland...the connections are tenuous at best; in fact, other than being photographs taken by me on various 'boundary-lands' journeys, there are no obvious connections at all. Lord Kitchener was the British Secretary of War who was lost at sea, along with 600+ seamen, when the ship in which he was travelling on a secret mission to Russia supposedly hit a German mine off the coast of Orkney on 05 June 1916. He was born in County Kerry, so he was almost assuredly familiar with Galway hookers. On 17 September 1917, my grandfather Owen Harper was killed during the Battle of the Somme, a gunner in the Canadian Field Artillery. He was born in Liverpool of Irish parents, but his father Moses Harper was lost at sea shortly after Owen was born. His grandfather, also named Moses Harper, also a seaman, was from Waterford, Ireland, so he was no doubt very familiar with Galway hookers. Young Owen's mother brought her son to Winnipeg, Manitoba where he grew up to become a printer. He and I share the same birthday. Fortunately for me, when he was killed at the age of 26 he left behind two young children, Owen and Naomi. Naomi grew up to become my mother in 1950. Three years later my parents were divorced, and I did not see my mother again for 26 years, and then only for an evening. Had it not been for my Uncle Owen, her brother, I would have known almost nothing about their father. As it was, Uncle Owen's information about his own father was curiously inaccurate, but then he hardly knew him either. Most of my information comes from dozens of hours of internet research. It's amazing what's available.
The Canadian prairies along the US border are vast and empty and beautiful. I camped one evening not far from Fort Macleod, Alberta, where the eastern slopes of the Rockies meet the prairies in a tangle of sandstone cliffs and gullies and grass, where for at least five millennia the plains natives harvested buffalo by driving them over the cliffs. Head-Smashed-In was one such location. At the edge of the campground was a line of about a dozen flower boxes, intended perhaps to make the bare prairie more homey. I sat at a picnic table with a box of Lethbridge Pilsner and thought about my grandfather coming over the ocean from Liverpool at age six, to return again twenty years later to die in the muck of France. He probably never got as far as Alberta. There is a small bay on Clifton Lake in northern Manitoba named Harper Bay after him. I on the other hand have never got as far as there either. His mother, my great-grandmother, who brought him to Canada must have seen some of Alberta, as she is buried here in Vancouver a few blocks from where I live. I didn't know that until I was living in this house. Her son is buried in France.
Some of this information is faintly legible on the left and right panels of this piece where it was scratched into wet ink. I don't particularly like sentimentally nostalgic work but I thought a bit of background here might be enlightening in terms of these two landscapes. As for the Galway hooker, they were a type of sailing boat of various sizes that plied the waters off the west coast of Ireland, all the way over to the Aran Islands, ferrying people, cattle, supplies, fishing, smuggling, you name it. In the smaller window pane above the boat is inscribed faintly 'I would have me a handsome boatman/ to ferry me over...' Lord Kitchener had six hundred handsome boatmen. I'm sure my grandfather only needed one.
