Tag: Harcourt House

Curiosities, Sketching with Words – AND – Catalysts, Part 2 … on the road!

Feel like I’ve been flying lately … not flying dreams, unfortunately!

So much going on:

– Had a fantastic time with Shawna Lemay co-faciliating the Sketching with Words workshop at Harcourt House for the Edmonton Poetry Festival last weekend! It was an amazing afternoon of writing and drawing and thinking and talking about all the connections between those lines on the page: the ones we write and the ones we draw, both to capture wheat we experience of the world as we know it. I feel extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Shawna, and such a great group of eager, talented people!

– Almost finished a mixed media assemblage for the fast& dirty collective’s upcoming po-up exhibition called Curiosities which will be coming to Edmonton streets the first weekend in June …

The curators have this to say about the project:

Curiosities: a fast & dirty project is an exploration of the politics of furniture. The project is a collaboration between five Edmonton curators: Jennifer Rae Forsyth, Robert Harpin, Kristen Hutchinson, Carolyn Jervis, and Kyla Tichkowsky and twenty artists: Matt Arrigo, Jeff Bai, Marnie Blair, Blair Brennan, Raylene Campbell, Sherri Chaba, Olivia Chow, Jennifer Rae Forsyth, Robert Harpin, Nickelas Johnson, Kristen Hutchinson, Adriean Koleric, Sydney Lancaster, Dawn Saunders Dahl, Sergio Serrano, Tyler Sherard, Alex Stewart, Claire Uhlick, and Ryan Wolters. Each curator has chosen a chest of drawers to accommodate artworks based on five different themes: intimacy, line, collections, landscape, and family. Each artist will be given a single drawer from one of these dressers to create a site-specific artwork.

Curiosities will be exhibited in a rental van from June 1-June 3 2012 in three different locations in Edmonton. The project asks artists and viewers to think about each dresser as a cabinet of curiosities and to consider each drawer as a small laboratory for investigation and experimentation. Drawers are intensely private spaces; they contain everything from the most precious, personal objects to everyday detritus that we just haven’t gotten around to getting rid of. After all, who knows what’s really hidden underneath that neatly folded sweater?

... and more to come, in short order!

I fly to Toronto tomorrow for a couple of dates on the next leg of the Catalysts tour (and then am back east for a couple of weeks mid May)… so the last couple of weeks (since the Edmonton launch), has been a hurry-up-go-faster-get-stuff-DONE time … hence my brevity and silence here.

The launch in Edmonton went well – a nice crowd, some lovely familiar faces that I hadn’t seen in a while, and some new ones, which is always a treat. So amazing to actually see the book, for real … paper, cover, pages, text … words!! Words we wrote. Wow. Not sure I’ll ever get used to that – which is a great thing, I think.

So … the next leg looks like this:

May 1st – Toronto @ the Magpie (831 Dundas Street W) with Oana A, Paul Vermeersch and Moez Surani. Catherine will be reading solo, and  we will read together as well, excerpts from our co-written essay.

May 2nd -Toronto @ Pivot Reading Series at The Press Club (850 Dundas Street W.) Catherine Owen with Gabe Foreman, Steven Price & Claire Tacon. I’ll be there too :).

– I head back to Edmonton after this – to do a talk on another project  I’m developing with Marian Switzer called YORK, for the Edmonton Arts Council Transitory Art Program  …

One of the rooms in the (now demolished) York hotel ...

… but Catherine keeps travelling and taking us into the world. She will be reading:

May 3rd – Hamilton @ Victoria Park/The Staircase Theatre! With John Terpstra as well as TO authors listed above!

May 5th – St Catharines w/Gregory Betts

May 8th – Ottawa @Tree with guests

May 17th – Vancouver @Robson Reading Series with Waubgeshig Rice (Midnight Sweatlodge)

May 25th – Victoria @ Planet Earth with guests.

So … now, to finish packing, panic that I’ve forgotten something crucial at least three times … and board that flight in the morning!

More news to follow – not doubt!

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Markers

Midnight brought the first real Spring rain to my corner of the world. This seems utterly fitting: rain that means new growing things, melting of the last snows, the washing clean of everything to start over. This is new, and old at once. Old in the way that each wheel’s turn reminds us that it has been this way for a very long time – and we are a part of that (if we choose to pay attention). New in the shape and character of this particular rain: its nature contradicts experience of this place, raises questions, reminds of other times and places.

Prairie born and raised – and now marking my first half-century on this day – I know what Spring Rain is in this place (or should be): coming out of nowhere, cloudburst, pummelling and drenching everything … and gone before I had time to get out the rain gear, leaving everything chilled and soaked to the bone and wondering what just happened.

But this rain isn’t like that.

This rain is steady, softly insistent and insidious. The stuff of coastal climes, oceanside, northern rain forest. The kind of rain that would have me hunting massive beds of moss in Goldstream Park on Vancouver Island, or walking the shore of Point Pleasant Park or the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Such a rain should make me wistful – nostalgic even – for these places that I love so much, that are part of the beating in my blood. But today … for some reason, today this rain makes me feel forward not back: quiet anticipation, the slow building of excitement for what will come, in every way.

Already, the shift has begun – the first marker of change: the buds on the May tree outside my house have burst open overnight to reveal the crisp green points of leaves. This first hesitant dusting will open over the next few days, proclaiming colour and promising scent from blossoms still latent, not yet formed.

Building things, growing things, changing: it feels as though these states, the active modes of being, are the shape of my life and work. What has lead to this moment in time … and what will shape the days to come.

And so much coming into being, and so soon:

The Catalysts Launch is this Sunday, April 15… and the books are coming by courier to my door today! Can’t wait to see them, and share that moment with my friend and collaborator Catherine, and then send the work out into the world with her.

This volume contains an essay co-written by yours truly!
This event is taking place in Edmonton, AB, Canada. Hope to see you there!

The Poetry Festival is coming soon, and with it the Sketching with Words workshop – which will be great fun to facilitate with Shawna Lemay.

Then Toronto, to Launch Catalysts there May 1 & 2.

I’m working on a little sculptural installation for the Fast & Dirty Collective too, for their show Curiosities, which will travel to various places in Edmonton on the weekend of May 11- 13.

And in between times, the work on NEST continues, as does work for on a particular aspect of the project in advance of the Harcourt House Open Studio event on June 21st.

It looks like a to-do list … but what I am really doing is counting blessings today, for all that I am doing, and for all of the magnificent people in my life that inspire me and make it all possible. A remarkable, humbling thing, this life.

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The Love Affair Else-where, Part II: Humans and Nests

The specific spark for the body of work I am developing over the course of my Residency at Harcourt House dates back well over a year now, to two conversations I had in quick succession, with two of my favourite poets: Catherine Owen and Jannie Edwards. Turns out, both of them had been re-reading Gaston Bachelard’s amazing work The Poetics of Space … and I had been reading some of Roger-Pol Droit‘s delightful explorations of phenomenology in his books How are Things? and 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life. I had let Bachelard’s book slip from my awareness a bit, and so after great talks with Cath and Jannie, I dug into The Poetics of Space once more, after a many-years absence. The reward was great and immediate – as it had been the first time I read his words.

Bachelard has this to say about nests:

A nest, like any other image of rest and quiet, is immediately associated with the image of a simple house.

And further:

A nest-house is never young … . For not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back to it, the way a bird comes back to its nest, or a lamb to the fold. This sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years, and through the dream, combats all absence.

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994,pp.98-99)

 So here we are at the intersection of the object, memory, emotion, and space: the confluence of the human beings’ relationship to things. But there’s more to this than meets the eye, if for no other reason than this is a human response to a non-human structure. A certain amount of species-centric thinking here, to be sure, but this is a discussion of human responses and ideas, after all.

And there’s no small set of contradictions in the human response to the bird nest – the ambivalence and ambiguity of which hooked me immediately – and simply required that I do something with it. Because, as Bachelard points out quite clearly, a “nest – and this we understand right away – is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security. Why does this obvious precariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind? (pp. 102-103)

Two nests I found within days of each other this past autumn. Hardly representative of the haven and security we seek.

There’s so much in the nest-as-object that screams insecurity, loss (potential or real), absence, ephemerality. And yet … and yet. They are also objects emblematic of ingenuity (be it hard-wired genetically or not), of a certain stick-with-it-ness in the face of any number of possible negative outcomes. Perhaps it is these things to which we respond so strongly. The idea of endurance, and the security that it brings … the longevity of memory that allows room for a return or two; the capacity to “use the available materials” (my thanks here to poet Louise Gluck) to craft a place that says “safe” that says “haven” … against all odds.

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Looking Toward Spring …

While I know it was inevitable, I am still not completely reconciled to the reality of the real winter weather and cold that has come so hard and fast here … and so I am indulging in a little escapism, and letting you know about something I will be doing in the Spring.

I will be teaching a three-evening workshop at Harcourt House this April, starting on the 16th. See below for details, and contact Harcourt House directly to register. I hope to see some of you there – looking forward to playing and creating together!

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New Studio, New Work … New Year

Have spent November and December settling into the new studio space I have for the Residency at Harcourt House, doing research, planning/plotting/scheming (i.e., orating out some if the too-many ideas I have for work!), and generally … well, nesting!

My predecessor, the remarkable David Janzen, left the AIR Studio in great shape for me to move in; freshly painted walls, swept, spic-and-span. My thanks to David for such a lovely welcome (although I do miss having him ‘over the wall’ as my studio buddy)!!

The paint spattered floor tells a different story from the pristine walls!

I LOVE my work bench!

Starting to move in …

Having the luxury of more than twice the space in which to work has been amazing so far. I’ve kept my regular studio (right next door), and am using that as a reading/research/drawing/’clean work’ space, so that I can devote the AIR Studio to the ‘messy work’ of fabrication and work on large-scale pieces.
And what have I been up to work-wise? So far, 300+ photographs of nests, for starters! I’m really excited by these images, and their graphic quality. They lend themselves to adaptation and extrapolation in other media – printmaking and drawing for starters … so I’m looking forward very much to working with them in various ways over the coming months.

I’ve also been drawing a fair bit, and loving that process as well. This, in particular, has become a way into working with nests as sculptural forms – of learning how they are built in a physical way, since the hand that makes the mark also builds the form and traces the limits of its structure in space. The drawings are also teaching me a great deal about scale, and its particular importance for this body of work. I’ll come back to this idea again in future posts, I’m sure, but for now, I’ll content myself with posting images of a few of the drawings I’ve done over the last couple of months …

Lots more to come … and I think I have figured out a couple of construction questions that will make for some interesting results! I’ll keep you posted!

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