fleeting as a life....

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Island. Video still. 2014
Photo from www.tiesenhausen.net.

Artist Peter von Tiesenhausen once made a boat out of ice. He carved it into or out of the existing ice on a slough on his property in rural northern Alberta.

(Ice is something we have a lot of here.)

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He lay down in the boat, and could see right through it. See the life in the water beneath him, all around him. In the dead of winter.

(There’s a reason they call it “dead.”)

Lying down in it, it fit him like a coffin. Like a vessel to hold body or soul. Like a vehicle to transport him on a solitary journey to another place/time. Another world.

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Recently, he has reprised this motif of the ice boat. In Iceland. Or "Island," as it is spelled in some languages. 

There he cut a boat from the existing ice, and set it free on the shores of the ocean. Creating another island. Another ice berg. Another chunk of fresh water to melt in our growing oceans; our rising seas. On our warming planet. Our changing world.

(A temporary island; fleeting as a life.)

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Island. Video still. 2014.
Photo from www.probertsongallery.com.

flotsam....

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Passages (detail). Wood and dirt. 2010
Photo from www.tiesenhausen.net.

If you were a kid in (English) Canada in the late 1960s and 1970s, you likely saw the National Film Board production, Paddle to the Sea. You were likely shown it in school. It told the story (written by Holling C. Holling) of a small toy canoe with a paddler in it, carved from a piece of cedar by a boy in the north. The boy set the canoe on a snowy hillside by his home. In the spring, it slid into a nearby stream, and, over the course of a couple of years, slowly found its way to the Atlantic.

I don’t know if artist Peter von Tiesenhausen ever saw this film, though he is of the right demographic.

Its themes are some of his own.

For his 2010 work, Passages, von Tiesenhausen carved 100 small wooden boats with passengers in them. He filled the spaces around the passengers with dirt from locations in the Bow River watershed, upstream from Calgary. Then he released the boats from a bridge over a small tributary of the Bow, in Calgary’s Douglasbank Park. Each one had been branded with the name of his website, in hopes that those who would find the boats would connect with him and tell their stories. And they did.

I wonder if any of those boats ever made it to the sea?

The original Paddle to the Sea boat used for the film. 1966

Watch the film in its entirety here.

between consciousness and materiality....

Tendril

“All you really have is striving to be ever more conscious, and to be present, and you can actually start to see the beauty that is all around us right now.” - Peter von Tiesenhausen



Between consciousness and materiality
art happens.

Where tendrils become barbs.
Tendrils grasping, clinging, bending
stems into rolling nests.
Mind grasping, shaping, bending
barbs into a swaying boat.

A lost boat.

A boat that sweeps like a broom,
adrift
on the waves of the air.

It even sounds like the sea.

approaches

Lyndal Osborne and John Freeman. Counterpoint. 2009
Val-David, Quebec.
Outdoor installation using the natural woods, PVC tubes, pigmented prints
on polyester film, rebar and foam.

Forty-one synthetic trees are "planted" in a grid within a clearing, within a natural forest.  The false takes up residence within the true. The art within the wild. The approach is concealed.

Lyndal Osborne and John Freeman. Counterpoint. 2009

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Sanctuary. 2012
Outdoor installation at Leighton Art Centre, Calgary, Alberta.
Comprised of 1000 poles harvested from the artist's land in northern Alberta
in the wake of the Mountain Pine Beetle devastation.

One thousand dead trees resurrected in the foothills of the Rockies, forming alleys that lead the eye to the mountains beyond. Or upwards to the sky. Imposing a human perspective on the landscape. Creating an approach to the sacred.

Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin. Martha Schwartz Partners.

Outdoor installation in front of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin. 2010

Red "trees" mark the approach to a theatre in Dublin. Creating obstacles, forcing indirection. Creating context. Lit at night like torches, lighting the way to the celebration within.

Dale Chihuly. Red Reeds. Glass.
Frederik Meijer Sculpture Gardens, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Spiky reeds of glass -- shards -- growing in a garden. Reaching upward, red slivers piercing the air. Impaling the sky. Approaching the light.






See more works by Peter von Tiesenhausen in the following posts on this blog: singed; burning man; and a book of days.  See more of Lyndal Osborne at spinners; or collecting as art practice.

a book of days

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Out of My Mind (detail).
1000 pieces in 10 bundles. Ashes and clay
on pulp, twine and sealing wax. 2011.

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Out of My Mind (detail).

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Out of My Mind (detail).

A thousand small pages, stacked one upon another. At intervals, bundled with twine and sealed with red sealing wax. Each one a record of one man's days, random and arbitrary and meaningful. Locked like a diary. Sealed like a letter. Closed like a door.

Each one a story, a small self-portrait. A meditation.

A memory.

See more works by Peter von Tiesenhausen at the following posts on this blog -- singed;  burning man; or approaches.

burning man

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Revelation (detail). 2000. Burned and carved plywood.

The fire that animates also consumes.

Peter von Tiesenhausen. Revelation (detail). 2000.
Burned and carved plywood.

For more posts about Peter von Tiesenhausen, click here,  or here, or here.

singed

You approach a volcanic pile of wood assembled for the night’s fire works. A work of fire.

The pyre is lit. The blaze begins; ravenously licking, crackling, snapping. 

As the initial energy is spent, you notice it: a lightless figure in the midst of the light. A black hole within the sun. Its pull is magnetic; gravitational. The shadow of a man, the darkness that fuels the fire. Charred, but not yet consumed. A human sacrifice, slowly smouldering.

For weeks, neither you nor the others who were there can think of anything else. Singed, none of you can make anything that does not contain fire. This fire.

In May 2007, visual artist Peter von Tiesenhausen hosted the artists and
mentors of Prairie North Creative Residency at his home in
Demmit, Alberta. After dinner and a tour of his land, on which
much of his most important work was completed and remains,
he lit a bonfire. Out of the fire emerged a figure, in the
tradition of his Watchers series. A self-portrait, burning
as if in effigy. Or perhaps rising from the flames like a phoenix.
Photos by Wendy Stefansson.

To see more of Peter von Tiesenhausen's work, go to http://www.tiesenhausen.net. Or click on any of the following links to posts on this blog: burning man; a book of days; or approaches.