this is it

Completed on 16 August 2014, screenprinting and drawing (including acid etching and sand-blasting) on three panels, the two wing panels are birch ply on beech cradles, while the central panel is 20 gauge steel fastened to the birch. Dimensions are 81" long x 23" wide x 7/8" deep (approximately 205cm x 58cm x 2cm). 

On my travels I frequently encounter the evidence of significant rural social change, partly I suppose because I tend to go to places where it is likely to be occurring, or to have already happened: the Canadian prairies, isolated communities such as the Hebrides and the Orkney Islands (Scotland), Aran (Ireland) and most recently the province of Newfoundland. The landscapes I visit are enticingly beautiful at the best of times, brutally unforgiving at the worst, especially when making a living involves the ocean, and of all oceans, the North Atlantic. The prairies, despite lacking an ocean of water, are no different with their oceans of summer grass giving way to the bitter winds and cold of winter. Extremes are the norm. The people in all these places are similarly and uncompromisingly independent, resilient and resourceful, because they choose to live in, or more likely were born into, shifting boundary zones between good fortune and calamity, luck and disaster, feast and famine, dependent on the fickleness of geography and weathers and the relationships that exist between the extremes of the boundary zone itself: water and land, land and sky, sky and water. The conversation of the inhabitants tends to allude to the constancy of that symmetry, usually laced with overt or covert humour. A single word or phrase can substitute for a complete conversation. For example, the single word 'Yep...' on the prairies (where I was born and raised), is often used to sum up what everyone in a group is thinking but no one is saying (usually out of politeness given the circumstances, such as the presence of strangers, or from the pointlessness of stating the obvious.)

"...when they meet together they converse with few words and in riddles, hinting darkly at things for the most part and using one word when they mean another; and they like to talk in superlatives, to the end that they may extol themselves and depreciate all other men. They are also boasters and threateners and are fond of pompous language, and yet they have sharp wits and are not without cleverness at learning. Among them are also to be found lyric poets whom they call Bards. These men sing to the accompaniment of instruments which are like lyres, and their songs may be either of praise or of obloquy. Philosophers, as we may call them, and men learned in religious affairs are unusually honoured among them..."
- Diodorus concerning the Gauls (Celts), c 1st Century BC (but then, he was 'from away'....!)
(http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5B*.html)

The work comprises three images from Newfoundland, but the images could symbolize or be replaced by other images from any similar place experiencing radical social change. I just happen to like these images and what they contain in personal memory of place and time, and what they may also refer to in other places and other times. The existential

Memorial to the victims of the 
1914 sealing disasters, unveiled in 
Elliston, Bonavista in June 2014

boundary zone of Newfoundland is almost exclusively the littoral zone - 'the shore' - beyond which is the North Atlantic, and behind which is rock and forest, the 'barrens'. For five hundred years, the culture of 'The Rock' has been crafted within this thin strip of survival in stories, songs and inevitably in the very structures necessary for life - the boats, the 'stages', the 'rooms' on the water's edge or on the water itself, and on land in the hard-edged boxes of houses that still speak of permanence and determination and place, but not necessarily of comfort. The greatest narratives revolve around the symmetries of the cod fishery and the sealing industry, sources of great wealth to a few, and of great sorrow to many others. Prior to this, we know very little, as the indigenous people - the Skraelings of the Vikings, Beothuk to us - were hunted down and exterminated centuries ago at the instigation of those great empire builders, the English. The best historical and contemporary studies of Newfoundland life have been written by Gerald Sider: 'Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration' (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, 1998), and 'Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland' (2003).

It would be impossible to put into this work a narrative of Newfoundland itself, and that's not my intention in the first place. I have my own narrative which is woven into these images, if only barely, because I 'come from away', a polite Newfoundland expression which means, among other things, that if I'm talking about Newfoundland and I'm not from Newfoundland, I don't really know what I'm talking about. There is something poignant about fishing

Bonavista Peninsula, June 2014

boats out of water, possibly not going back in; there is something beautifully functional about a rickety stage built over the water to handle the fish coming in, although they won't be coming in again for a long time, possibly never to this stage. Quaint and picturesque is what we see; what we don't see is the 'shore crowd' who did the work of unloading, cleaning and packing the cod for hundreds of years... they are already long gone, and they won't ever be back, or at best, their descendants are working at one of the massive shrimp and crab plants up - or down - the shore or somewhere 'round the bay', which refers to anywhere that isn't St. John's.

Within the image on the left panel are inscribed very faintly the words of the lament: Take me back to my Western boat/ Let me fish off Cape St. Mary's/ Where the hogdowns sail and the foghorns wail/ With my friends the Browns and the Clearys/ Let me fish off Cape St. Marys...while on the right panel are phrases from the 1877 Halifax Fisheries Commission, specifically: The cod fishery is one of which there is no fear of diminution, let alone extermination...as the Americans argued that they should be granted more access to the cod in what were the territorial waters of the British colony of Newfoundland at the time. The central panel is a fishing stage at New Perlican on the Avalon Peninsula, one of hundreds of tiny and stunningly beautiful outports along the Newfoundland coast which existed because of the cod fishery, and whose inhabitants were 'encouraged' to leave their homes and move to larger centres in the 1950's, concurrent with the collapse of the 500-year-old fishery. In 1992, Canada placed a moratorium on cod-fishing within our territorial waters in the hopes of stemming the rapacious practices of other nations with their factory boats. 

The title refers to the usual answer to the ubiquitous Newfoundland question: 'what are you at? (waddyat?)' I have asked myself that question many times over many years, and the best answer really is 'this is it'.