Circumnavigation: West Coast Vancouver Island

By the time we were on the west coast my knitting had grown much longer.

And I was working my way through the pile of stowed books. They included a few about and by Emily Carr because this was the country she traveled through and worked in.

Kerry Mason Dodd's book 'Sunlight in the Shadows. The Landscape of Emily Carr' is full of photographs of places Emily visited. It gave us clues as to where Emily visited and we were able to stop at a few of those places.

Emily Carr, Indian Church', 1927, oil on canvas, 108.6 x 68.9cm. Art Gallery fo Ontario.

photographed from Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall's 'Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo. Places of their Own.'

Emily Carr did sketches for this painting when she visited Friendly Cove, Nootka Island.

We anchored in Friendly Cove, puttered ashore and went in search of the church. We learnt from the resident warden that particular church burnt down in 1954. The above church was built as a replacement 2 years later on a new site further towards the point. It is now a museum for the local First Nations band's collection of artefacts.

Also in Friendly Cove is the Nootka Light Station.

Emily Carr sketched the light station buildings during a later visit, in 1929. 

I found this image in Doris Shadbolt's 'The Sketchbooks of Emily Carr. Seven Journeys.' 

Reading about Emily Carr, Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Khalo, 3 artists with intense connections to nature and long attachments to specific places, helped me during the month at sea to look longer and deeper at the water, land and sky that is home and a source of inspiration for my work. As a result, I have a sketchbook of ideas to work with.

Mi'kmaq Material Culture

I continued my research on the material culture of the Mi'kmaq.
Inspired by the cover of this excellent book by Ruth Holmes Whitehead...

...I worked an image of a bark house in cotton on evenweave canvas.

After more reading...

...I collected materials to represent the ones the Mi'kmaq used in their daily lives.
Now what to do with them?
How can I tell a story about how the Mi'maq lived in the Bay of Fundy? 

Articulation Work

I have been working on a series for the Articulated Materials: Bridging Waters exhibitions Articulation and Material Girls have organised. Each member of Articulation made and sent one work to the UK where it was exhibited with a body of work produced by a similar group, Material Girls, based around London.
After a successful 3-gallery tour in 2012, the work has been returned to Canada, including one work from each of the Material Girls group. There are 3 galleries in Canada booked to show Articulated Materials: Bridging Waters over 2013 and 2014 (see side bar on the right).
In the meantime, Articulation members are in their studios producing more work to add to their response to the Bay of Fundy to complement Material Girls' study of the River Thames.

For my first work I researched some of the many rock carvings left by the first inhabitants of the Bay of Fundy coastline. I have continued my research of the Mi'maq material culture.

During 2 visits to the Fundy area I found Mi'kmaq artifacts in museums.
A chair seat cover (mid 1800s) made from dyed porcupine quills on a birch bark ground. The technique is often described as a form of weaving but I see it as an embroidery technique because the quills are manipulated the same way as thread. They are twisted, laid down and couched, while the ends pierce the ground.

This colourful porcupine embroidered basket is newer as evidenced by the use of aniline dyes to produce brighter colours. It was entered in the 1901 Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition in Halifax.
The small basket in front would have been produced for the tourist market. It is made from ash splints, hickory bark and grasses by a member of the Waban-Aki group in the mid 1900s.

I found Mi'kmaq footwear in the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto.
The white decoration on the vamp of these moccasins (1830-1840) is beadwork, using the smallest beads on any shoe in the museum's collection.

Beading techniques allowed embroiderers to move away from traditional geometric designs. The more organic lines and shapes were appropriated from European embroidery styles at the time. It is an indicator of increasing contact between North American aboriginals and Europeans.
My research continues...

'Meadow's' Narrative

This work is another in a series where i have been using a technique developed by the co-founder and co-principal of the Opus School of Textile Arts, Julia Caprara. (Since Julia's death the school is known as the Julia Caprara School of Textile Arts, of which I am a student)
.Julia published a series of articles in Quilting Arts magazine where she demonstrated several of her distinctive techniques, if you want to see how this work is done.

This work has two stories, one from my interests as a geographer and the other from my interest in the Blackfoot Nation's stories.

The Fireweed plant is known as a 'first coloniser' after an area has been disturbed by natural occurrences such as avalanches, floods, fires and man-made disturbances such as forestry, road works, urban development. Fireweed moves in and stabilises the ground so other plants can then take root.

I have continued to explore this natural process of succession and how humans fit in with it as a concept in some of the new work to be shown in Calgary next week.

At another level, i see the Fireweed as an enabler and nurturer of others, a traditional role taken on by women in our society, which is why it is appropriate for the work to be made from fabric and thread and stitched, traditionally the media used by women in their homes.

The second story comes form the Blackfoot people. A woman went to a campsite of a group of braves who had captured and tied up her lover. She started a fire in the prairie grasses at one end of the camp to distract the braves and ran around to the other side of the camp to untie and rescue her lover. They both then ran across the prairies and headed for the mountains.
When the braves had worked out how they had been tricked, they started to chase the couple. They were gaining on the couple until they came across a string of fires that blocked their way. The fires sprang up where ever the woman's moccasins touched the ground and so protected them from getting caught. After the fires died down Fireweed grew in the place of her footsteps.

If you look at any image of the Fireweed you will see magenta flowers and blue-green leaves. In this work i really pushed the intensity of these colours because i wanted it to appear strong and full of life.

Julia Caprara & Symbols

Julia was interested in symbols left behind by ancient peoples. So here are some Canadian petroglyphs and pictographs for Julia.


Canadian Rockies, Alberta

Saint Victor, Saskatchewan

Nanaimo, Vancouver Island