Nomadic Residency, Part I

Nomadic Residency, part I
Place des Artistes de Farrellton, La Pêche, Qc.

So much thanks to PAF – Place des Artistes de Farrellton for hosting Gail Bourgeois and I this past week! We are off to a good start. Next month our nomadic residency will find us at Lac Leamy. Momentum is building as I give myself permission to play, learn from the materials and find a rhythm in discipline as time’s carved out and protected.

In the days following the residency, ideas have been deepening and surfacing as I listen, record thoughts and play with materials, alongside the themes that emerged over the four days Gail and I spent together. I’ve been re-listening to a series of interviews from the podcast For the Wild, and one with Robin Wall Kimmerer has stuck with me. I was first introduced to her books Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss when I was doing my Bachelor of Education. Kimmerer’s work as botanist/scholar interweaves indigenous knowledge and scientific perspectives in poetic ways which speaks to and resonates with my own practice and process of using art as a way of engaging with the landscapes I’m a part of. By deepening my relationship to the region I’m in, connections are made, and dialogue is facilitated with the folks that I share intersecting/overlapping communities with. Restoring one’s creativity (and relationship with the natural world) is becoming more present, and perhaps urgent to me as something to protect as I feel life’s demands in an ever hungry capitalist, colonial world that takes but does not give back or seek to reflect and understand.  By re-storying the places we find ourselves in, I believe it’s possible to reclaim another way of seeing ourselves in relation to the natural world. By visiting, naming and and feeling connected to the ecosystems in which we live, we begin to give back and see how embedded we are in something much bigger.

Since last week, Gail and I became more clear on the places and sites suiting our creative process, and where we might work together over the next year to build a new body of work. Applications for residencies have been submitted to Artscape Gibraltar Point (and accepted – which I found out today), as well as to Culture Outaouais for a research and creation residency at the historic Maison Fairview for next Summer.

 

Day 1
Today, I began session one of the nomadic residency I’ve been planning with fellow artist Gail Bourgeois* since last Winter. For the next four days, we will be on-site, outdoors at Place des Artistes de Farrellton (PAF is an old school transformed into studios for artists in La Pêche, Qc.).  For the next year, we plan to share four art residency days per month, each session to take place at a new site within the Outaouais region.

I began my morning on the Gatineau River, floating on a raft I built, with a desire to generate some images that were relatively quick to make. I began by painting hydrologically inspired maps onto cedar tiles, then went on to cut images of cedar, willow and aquatic plants into blocks that I’ll explore some relief printing on later this month. The plan was loose, but from experience, my creative process makes more sense when I’m embodied, and have a relationship to site first (and there’s geographic context, ie: i know where I am). A swim in between bursts of focus helped! The first of my four days began by kickstarting creations off riverside, from the perspective of water-body, before making my way up the hill to the old school grounds. What I noticed most was how present the highway was. The 105’s logging and mining trucks are loud and emit a fair bit of diesel stench. The speeded barrelling machinery is constant. The roadway and waterway are parallel to one another. The tension between the realities of each of those arteries is still with me — the juxtaposition of the waft of diesel and cool river water upon my legs lingers most in my memory.

Gail and I first collaborated in 2016, thanks to a talk organized by the Ottawa Art Gallery, featuring her exhibit Correspondence, in which I moderated and asked questions about her work. It was a great conversation that led to some great new opportunities. We are now each respectively building a body of new work, in which we hope to co-create an artist book and exhibition. The August edition (part II) will take place at Leamy Lake in Hull, Qc.

What Gail and I share in common is an interest in interdisciplinary thinking and cross-pollination throughout the arts, science, politics, and ecology especially as it pertains to our current global moment. Over the years, I’ve been finding inspiration in the work of many land artists and community-based artist/activists, but veteran land artist Chris Drury articulates my long-time considerations well in the following quote:

“But as an artist I can look at the bigger picture and act as a linking conduit between many disciplines. Science may be one, but then local indigenous knowledge is often just as significant. What the farmer knows from continual exposure to the processes of the natural world can be every bit as revealing as the latest findings from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The farmer, however, may not know about the similar findings of the ecologist and vice versa. So I have often seen what I do as a way of making connections through the dance of mind and body with material substance.”

My friend, herbalist/scholar Lana McGeary refers to this form of thinking as bridging literacies, and so I’ve developed a hope that through my work, the connections I am making in my art and thinking will serve to bridge literacies, to reinforce connections between people and place and allow me to fall even more in love with the landscapes to which I belong, and owe my life to.

*Gail Bourgeois is an artist based in Gatineau. She holds an MFA from Concordia University, is a founding member of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale Montréal), and has founded or formed part of a dozen artists’ collectives. She maintains a studio-based drawing practice where themes and methods of working the tension between academic knowledge and experimental forms of knowledge based on her interest in collective practices and community engagement. Bourgeois is also involved with ArtWise, a program at the Ottawa Art Gallery promoting intergenerational engagement in the arts.

      

 

Day 2
Plywood prints; ink spills; layering; lino blocks onto old maps from old travels.

           

 

Day 3 + 4

         

                      

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The above five images I created in the days following our time at Place des Artistes de Farrellton using white ink, black ink, graphite pencil. All these lines are inspired by one of my favourite maps and places (Low 31/G13). Something seems to be on their way… Layers to be sure.