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! 









      

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'.
  

overover

Completed 04 January 2014. Screenprinting, drawing, acid etching, sandblasting and other processes on cradled birch panel (centre) and 20-gauge steel bonded to cradled birch panels (two side panels).  67"x23"x 7/8". Continuing with boundary language, memory, voyages, travelling, searching, exploration...using images collected on my various perigrinations. The central panel is based on a photo of a schooner model in a window in a shed in Hearts Delight, Newfoundland, a small community on the western side of the Avalon Peninsula overlooking Trinity Bay (2013). The left panel is the cliff edge at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort Macleod, Alberta (2009). The right panel is the view from the cliff-edge wall of Dún Aonghasa on the western side of Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland  near Galway (2011).

The construction of Dún Aonghasa (the 'Fort of Aonghas') was probably begun about 3,000 years ago, possibly as a final refuge for the Fir Bolg, one of the indigenous peoples of Ireland, after they were driven westwards by the invading Tuatha Dé Danann ('People of the Goddess Danu'). Further defensive works were added, including three additional defensive walls and ditches, the latter probably built during the Iron Age about 500BCE. These walls are further protected by extraordinary chevaux de frise,  fields of massive upright sharp-edged stones that severely restrict any access to the dun except along two or three designated paths. The edge of the dun is the cliff itself, dropping a hundred metres to the ocean below. The Iron Age is the great age of heroes in various mythologies, with a confusion of gods, battles, and narratives spanning centuries. The collapse of the Bronze Age which coincided with the beginnings of the Iron Age - and iron weapons - is associated with the sacking of major cities across the Mediterranean area, and the building of hilltop forts, possibly as refuges for survivors during the thousand-year Greek Dark Ages that followed. This corresponds to the fall of the Mycenaean empire beginning around 1200BCE, and includes such mythological events as the destruction of the city of Troy. That event generated Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, in which the poet uses several collective names in reference to the Greeks, including the Achaeans and the Danaans (which included Odysseus). Other contemporary records refer to mysterious Sea Peoples, bands of sea-borne and possibly homeless raiders operating in the Mediterranean, who may have included Homer's Odyssians returning from their ten-year adventure at Troy. Egyptian sources indicate that this was not just random pirating by the enigmatic Sea Peoples, but full-scale migrations of populations looking for new homes.  Is it possible that the Tuatha Dé Danann who drove the Fir Bolg to the utmost extremities of Ireland at about this time were Homer's Danaan Sea Peoples? The Irish Book of Invasions attributes Greek origins to both the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha Dé Danann. In Dante's Inferno, Ulysses (Odysseus) relates an alternate ending to the Odyssey in which he travels beyond the Pillars of Hercules (into the Atlantic) in search of new adventures. Three thousand years later...I am standing in a hill fort at the edge of the world, wondering what deeds, famous and infamous, occurred here, and have been long forgotten, or retold and woven into Ireland's complex mythological fabric... 'Now the Fir Bolg were all slaughtered in that battle, as we have said, save a few; and those of them who survived fled before the Tuatha De into the outermost isles and Islets of the sea, so that they dwelt in them after that...' (from the Irish Book of Invasions).

Chevaux de frise on the approach to Dun Aonghasa

Dun Aonghasa, Inis Mor (Aran)

If we think of what we now know about human and cultural evolution as a very long history of shape-shifting, stories told by shamans for thousands of years, it's not hard to imagine that creation myths are pre-literary attempts to explain the apparent magic of the human situation, although not necessarily that of the human condition (art, and to a certain extent religion, in all their various forms attempt to do that, amongst other things). Our solid relationship with land, as opposed to a tenuous one with water, is a major part of the mystery, and it's interesting to see how creation myths frequently address the idea that the gods and/or goddesses who created us were themselves water gods (the goddess Danu, for example), or brought us forth from water even as they created solid land for us to live on. As animals of land and air, we have an uneasy, fascinated and fascinating affinity for water - and water's nemesis, fire.  Earth, Water, Air, Fire...the classical four elements which drove alchemy, later science. It has only been since the Renaissance that we have been able to develop a more complex exploration of the elements and our place in the universe. We tend to associate those developments with explorations that gave us the so-called New World, courtesy of Columbus, for example, but this is increasingly being seen, at least partially, as a construct to establish/explain/justify the assumed superiority of certain peoples in the general hierarchy of human evolution. There is evidence that the ancient Greek navigator Pytheas (c.300BCE) reached Ireland, and possibly travelled by sea along the coast of what is now Norway, as far north as the Arctic Circle where he and his crew encountered ice and fog, such that '... land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it is said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail...'. In Greek the phrase  'marine lung' also apparently refers to jellyfish, an appropriate comparison to this tangible, moving but amorphous boundary area between earth, water and air...What we don't know about the ancient navigators is almost certainly considerably more than what we do know.

The  cliff edge at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump...it's higher than it looks!

On another continent, probably but not necessarily unknown to the ancient Greeks, other indigenous peoples were creating and immersing themselves in their own mythologies and histories. For the plains people of what is now Canada and the USA, the cycles of living revolved around the migrations of animals, notably the enormous herds of buffalo. At about the time that the Fir Bolg were being driven to the western cliff edges of Ireland,  North American indigenous plains tribes had already been using cliffs along the western boundary zone between mountains and prairies for thousands of years to harvest the buffalo, herds of which followed the grazing across the prairies and into the foothills over the course of spring and summer. As the buffalo began to move back towards wintering grounds on the prairies as autumn descended from the mountains, they could be carefully maneuvered  towards the relatively shallow sandstone cliffs and driven over them to be slaughtered. Until the introduction of the horse by Europeans around 1600AD, this was the only feasible way to hunt buffalo efficiently. For North American First Nations, a 'book of invasions' would be relatively small: some 10-12,000 years of a relationship with the land that provided everything, tribal battles over territories and mythologies created therefrom, followed by 500 years of invasive destruction up to the present day. Their cliff edge, like that faced by the Fir Bolg, is cultural, psychological, physical...the boundary between being and nothingness.

 
The boat? For some reason, I am drawn to boats in windows. Boats are the ultimate boundary zone vessel, beautiful in form and function, and windows are, in these cases, the invisible boundaries the models inhabit. People who live by the ocean often have boats in their windows...while considering this, it did occur to me that I've never seen a farmer with a tractor in his window. I may need to find one.

All of the above, of course, has only tangential relationships with what the work is really about, which is not a complete mystery to me but at the same time is not particularly easy to explain...

Some information I've looked at...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart%27s_Delight-Islington

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aonghasa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danu_%28Irish_goddess%29

http://www.donaldcorrell.com/tales/invasions.html

idir dhá dhánta

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.

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.

row row

Completed 23 February 2013. Approximately 57" long x 19" wide x 3/4" deep (150cm x 50cm x 2cm). Screenprinting and drawing, etching and sand-blasting on three wood panels and steel (please click on image for larger view). The two wing panels are 22-gauge sheet steel bonded to wood panels; the centre panel is wood. Images again from 'boundary zones': the central image is of an Irish currach that was sitting by a stone wall near the northern-most tip of Inishmore of the Aran Islands off Galway. In May of 2011 I went for a walk in Ireland, which had as its main destination the Aran Islands. I wanted to visit the famous iron-age fort of Dun Angus, amongst other places, but the weather was atrocious. I was staying at a B&B near Kilronan, and the owner suggested that if I walked into town to the hotel I could easily find someone who would take me wherever I wanted to go. So I did, and ended up in a van with Paul and a group of American nuns who wanted to see some holy sites near the tip of Inishmore. Paul was an extraordinary guide, and an avowed heathen, so the trip, albeit only about half an hour in length, was hilarious, moving and enlightening, although not necessarily so for the nuns. If you ever want to meet Paul, he apparently worships most afternoons at his church, the American Bar in Kilronan, which is actually owned by a Canadian, according to him, though it was his understanding that no self-respecting Canadian would ever be caught drinking in a bar of such a name, although it was otherwise perfectly acceptable etc., etc. The currach of the Aran Islands is a beautifully hand-built craft designed for the north Atlantic, somewhere between a freighter canoe and a Newfoundland dory, usually rowed but capable of taking a sail. Its agility and uses on the water, and the skills of the islanders who use them, are discussed at length in J.M. Synge's The Aran Islands (1911). I walked back from the tip of the island to Dun Angus (another story in itself!), and eventually from there back to the turf fire and a few pints in Tigh Joe Mac's bar in Kilronan. One thinks on these walks, as Bruce Chatwin and others were fond of observing. In this case, I was thinking of - or perhaps just absorbing - the power of wind, water, myth, history...all those 'powers' that are constantly with you in places like Aran, or the Orkneys north of Scotland (source of the left image, the stones at Stenness), or of coming down from the Crowsnest Pass of the Canadian Rockies into the foothills of Alberta, and seeing since my last trip through there a decade ago the sprouting of hundreds of wind turbines along the ridges of the Eastern Slope (the image on the right) intercepting the powerful and constant winds that drive out from the pass and blow incessantly across that part of the prairies. I was amazed but not happy to see them, as that particular vista was amongst my favourite experiences of descending into the flatlands that stretched ahead for another 500 miles...the land that is, in fact, my home. Vandalized as it were in my absence, yet even as it struck me as such, I knew it was better than the alternatives...As I passed these all-but-silent towers, I was reminded again of the constructs to and of power - and of the people who do the constructing - that are both alien yet strangely beautiful in their purposes.

mine mine

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.