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.

glass glas

glass glas...completed in August 2012. 49" wide x 23" high and 7/8" deep (approximately 125cm x 58cm x 2cm), screenprinting and drawing on birch panels and steel. The two outside panels are thin steel bonded to the wood panels; the central square panel is wood. The three panels are worked on separately, then fastened together as one piece. Again, this work deals with ideas contained in previous work pertaining to boundary language, idiotic symmetry, memory, private and public narrative, private and public space, time, light...the list seems to keep growing! The wing panels are derived from photographs taken in a hotel room in Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare, Ireland, in May of 2011, while the central panel is from a photo of a slough somewhere in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, taken two years earlier. Although these began originally as photographic images with no particular purpose, they eventually find some connection through my meanderings. The photographs then supply a structure on which the image and its meanings are built - the 'construction' lines are easily visible in the central panel (and they also may obliquely reference the system of land surveying used in Canada which divides the country into square miles known as sections). The screenprinting stencils are created by printing (on an inkjet printer) the original photograph (in black ink) in sections that fit onto 8.5" x 11" transparencies. These transparencies are then spliced together to generate the 'big' transparency that will be used to make the screenprint stencil (the wing panels each involve six transparencies spliced together, the central panel has twelve). It is puzzling but also interesting that the computer will 'interpret' information in such a way so as to produce the optimum image through its choices, rather than mine, meaning that the individual transparencies, although originally derived from the same photo using the same printing preferences, end up being visually different from each other as statements about light and space, relative to what the camera - or I, for that matter - recorded, hence the accidental construction grid.
Lisdoonvarna is famous for its matchmaking festival in the fall, which involves a great deal of dancing, apparently, so this piece had a working title of dance dance. Within the central panel, if the viewer looks closely, can be read the scraffito text of some Joni Mitchell (Alberta born and Saskatchewan raised) lyrics from her song 'All I Want' on her stunningly beautiful album 'Blue', which was released when I had just turned twenty, a long time ago...what I wanted then is still all I want. But the working title seemed both obvious and obtuse, and I preferred something that was less obvious and possibly more obtuse. There was a toss-up eventually between clare claire and glass glas, the first playing on words describing space (as in County Clare) and light (as in clear/claire), the second on materials of transparency (glass) and reflection (glas, Irish 'green', Welsh 'blue', Scottish 'water', amongst other meanings in other languages). There is, of course, a great deal else not being said at all...

blue blue

blue blue...completed near the end of January 2012. Length 56", width 16", 7/8" deep (~140x40x2cm). Screenprinting and drawing on three wood panels which were then fastened together as one piece. The central panel is thin sheet steel bonded to the wood.

'May the road always rise to meet you...'

The left image is derived from a photo I took on Inish More, the largest of the three Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. I was on the 'rock road', which is exactly what it sounds like, a narrow road on bare rock running along the height of land on the southeasterly side of the island. From the road, one can look southwest across the gentle grey slope of the Burren-esque landscape to the Atlantic beyond. This image was taken a kilometre or so east of Liam O'Flaherty's home and his elegant memorial at Gort na gCapall, looking northwest towards the village of Kilmurvey, at the foot of the long slope that rises to the extraordinary stone walls of Dun Aonghasa (Dun Angus). In one of their sagas the Vikings speak of  'the enemy before you, and a cliff at your back'. They could have been speaking of Dun Angus.

The right image comes from the Canadian prairies, somewhere in the southernmost part of Saskatchewan. I grew up on the prairies and I am still awed by and drawn to the powerful peace and beauty of this landscape in all seasons, the home at one time of the Blackfoot and Sioux first nations, amongst others, and more recently but still long gone, the great Metis buffalo hunters and their families. The lonely expanses still seem to whisper longingly for Poundmaker, Crowfoot, Sitting Bull, Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel and all of the magnificent people who lived here for five millennia before we 'settlers' arrived with our fenceposts and barbed wire to divide and partition, frequently for no apparent reason, this seemingly endless sea of grass.

Tigh Joe Mac's Bar, Kilronan

Finally, the central image is from the mirror and mantlepiece above the fireplace in one of the world's loveliest and coziest bars, Tigh Joe Mac's in Kilronan, the main town on Inishmore. It is here, after a long day of walking in wind, rain and sporadic sunshine that you'll find a warm turf fire, an equally warming beverage of your choice, never-ending craic, and sometimes an impromptu musical session*. Facing the mirror above the fireplace, one can see the reflection of a large painting on the wall of a four-man curragh, the skin and wood rowing/sailing craft used by the islanders for centuries to fish and to transport themselves and just about anything else to wherever it or they were wanted or needed. The painting in Tigh Joe Mac's is reminiscent of a similar illustration by Jack Butler Yeats in J.M. Synge's The Aran Islands (1907).

As in all my work, there is a public and private narrative contained within each piece and from piece to piece, only one aspect of the 'idiotic symmetry' that lies at the heart of these pieces, and which continues to drive my motivations and reasons for making the work.

 

*(added ten years later...28 November 2022): 

'It was a long walk, the full length of Inis Mór along the rock road, with side paths up to Dún Eoghanachta and Dún Aonghasa, so a warming pint or two by the turf fire in Tigh Joe Mac’s tiny bar was necessary. The handball kids were out on the patio, sending one of their crowd in periodically for more soft drinks to mix with their smuggled mickeys. Their chaperone Valerie eventually gave up and settled herself at a table inside. The Eurovision Song Contest was playing on the small tv behind the bar, eliciting frequent loud commentary by three or four young lads seated there. At another of the tables were three ancient islanders, dozing over their half pints.
‘Fuck this!’ said Valerie suddenly and loudly, and from under her bench pulled out an accordion and started playing a wild tune. The lads at the bar spun around in surprise. The bartender reached over and clicked off the tv. The ancients snapped awake, wide-eyed. Valerie ran through a few lively pieces, then plopped the accordion down as the bartender put a pint before her. The bar was suddenly enveloped in silence. Then:

‘Sing us one of the old songs, Betty’ croaked one of her companions. ‘Oh, no, I can’t sing any more,’ says Betty, ‘My voice is gone now’. Betty looks like she’s made of tissue paper, difficult to imagine a voice inside her at all. ‘Ach, no! Your voice is not gone at all. I can hear you when I walk past your house’ piped up the other. ‘Oh no, I really can’t. I’m out of tune now, and practice’ she protested, but not very convincingly. All eyes in the bar were on Betty now. Another few moments of silence, then she sat up straight, raised her eyes to the ceiling… and I swear an angel started to sing, in Irish, that late spring afternoon in Tigh Joe Mac’s, after a long walk down Inis Mór.'

This is the magic of Ireland. It stays with you forever, wherever you go, wherever you are, whatever you're doing.

New work...quiet quiet

This work continues where my previous work was interrupted (see the Prairie Long Poems for example on  http://coconutmonkeypress.blogspot.com
In May 2011 I spent a month in Ireland, mostly on the central and southern west coast. Images collected there are being combined with images collected on a trip to the Canadian prairies during the summer of 2009. This piece is called quiet quiet. The two exterior images are views downriver and upriver respectively from the centre of Leam Bridge in Galway, aka The Quiet Man Bridge, as it features in the film starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara c. 1952. The central image is the outdoor Shamrock Drive-In at Killarney, Manitoba in Canada. The piece is approximately 130cm x 40cm (52"x16"), screenprinting and drawing on wood panels, the central image being on steel plate affixed to a wood panel. In the signboard of the drive-in image, I've rearranged some of the letters to suggest the film showing is 'The Quiet M...'

Return of Coconut Monkey Press

After some time, I've decided to get back to this blog with updates...due to my absence, my original blogs* were impossible to access (even the blogosphere is bureaucratic!), but please check back at your leisure for new stuff!
* http://coconutmonkeypress.blogspot.com 

I have found that I cannot edit the posts in 'Coconut Monkey Press'. This photos of the work do not enlarge for viewing as they were originally intended to do - and once did - by clicking on the image; however, if you right-click on the image and choose 'Open in a new tab', the image will open for viewing in a new tab. My apologies for this inconvenience and/or confusion but it is completely out of my control to update any aspect of this older version of my blog.