Completed summer solstice 2013. Screenprinting and drawing processes on wood panels and steel. 57" x 23" x 7/8" (145cm x 58cm x 2cm). The two end panels are birch ply cradled panels; the centre is sheet steel bonded to a cradled birch panel. The colouring within the figures on the steel panel was created with diluted acid puddled on the plate and allowed to sit over night.
A little over a year ago I climbed to the top of the steeple of Chapelle Notre-Dame-De-Bon-Secours in Old Montreal, where you can look out across the St. Lawrence River with a huge angel sculpture flanking you on either side. The first chapel, a small stone building, was established on this spot in 1675 as a church of pilgrimage dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. (An exceptionally good history of the chapel can be found in Patricia Simpson's and Louise Pothier's Notre-Dame-De-Bon-Secours ISBN 2-7621-2224-4). Over the centuries, as Montreal grew in scale, so did the church, although it maintained its special connection to the port, to sailors and dockworkers, and to all those arriving in Montreal via the river. This included hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century fleeing The Hunger, at a time when Montreal's own population was barely 50,000. The villainy of the Anglo-Irish landlords in perpetuating the Irish famines as a form of genocide is well documented, as is the discrimination against and outright hatred of the Irish immigrants by the English Orangemen of Upper Canada (now Ontario). Many thousands of the Irish stayed and settled in Quebec, where they were welcomed, and it didn't hurt that they happened to be both anti-English and pro-Catholic. The 'Two Solitudes' in Canadian history, often simply interpreted as Quebec French versus Ontario English are more complicated than that. It's more like Anglo-American/English protestants versus everybody else, a sad history that has touched the lives of probably every Canadian at one time or another, and continues to be dragged into every national election in some new and tedious iteration. There is in fact only one solitude in Canada, and that's the solitude of every thinking Canadian who realizes this country is still too big, too complicated and too beautiful to be comprehended by most of its inhabitants.
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| The garden at Gort na gCapall |
A year before I stood on the steeple deck of the church in Old Montreal, I had been walking in the west of Ireland. Along the so-called 'rock road' of Inishmore, largest of the Aran islands, I came across a small commemorative garden at the tiny village of Gort na gCapall. It was dedicated to the village's most famous son, the writer Liam O'Flaherty, who was born there about fifty years after the worst of the famines. In the garden is a sculpture depicting four oarsmen on a stylized boat, probably in reference to the four-man curragh the islanders have used for centuries for fishing and transportation on the North Atlantic. I have not been able to find out anything about the sculptor yet (although I have sent an information request to the Galway Library), so I cannot credit the artist, whose image I 'appropriated' for the central panel. I'm not sure what the artist's intentions were, but I read the image as the crossing of the River Styx, perhaps with O'Flaherty as one of the oarsmen in the company of his Aran islanders. O'Flaherty's writing was somewhat overshadowed by some of the other great writers and the tumultuous history of that period, but he was a key figure in the Irish cultural and political revival of the early 20th Century. A documentary of his life entitled Idir Dhá Theanga (Between Two Languages) was made in 2002 but I have been unable to find a copy of it, yet. It was these concepts of solitudes, spiritual guardians, 'between-ness' and journeying by water that seemed to connect the images I've used in this piece, along with many other less tangible or definable references to boundaries and histories of language and imagery.
Shortly after I returned from Ireland in 2011, exactly two years ago today, one of Canada's most thoughtful writers, Robert Kroetsch, was killed in a car accident. I had been working on a project involving Robert and several other poets, and it was a great shock to all of us, and to untold numbers of other Canadians and writers around the world to lose him. I would like to dedicate this work to Robert. The title is Irish, meaning between two poems.
