here, and between worlds....

Richard Watts. The Three Seasons exhibit (installation view)
 at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. 2012
On the wall: Shield Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird.
In the foreground: Canoe Shedding Skin.

Richard Watts makes impressions.

Literally.

His process involves covering derelict structures — especially boats — or ancient rock faces or old growth trees, with natural rubber and gauze. Dressing them, like wounds. Wrapping them like mummies. Then peeling the rubber layering off; revealing them like bodies, like flesh.

In the wrapping is the art, taking from each object, as it does, an exact impression of its texture. The marks of the boat’s making, its origins; the scars of its experience. Stealing, too, some of the actual surface. Old paint, splinters, leaves, bits of rust and debris. The accretions of time and place; of creation and purpose and decay. Its skin. Its materiality.

Watts is creating a record. A memory. A shroud.

A relic and a reliquary.

Richard Watts. Boat Skin. Rubber, gauze, peeled paint.
Photo by Yuri Dojc.

The shrouds are empty. By and in their presence, they speak of absence. Of immanence and transcendence.

Lifted up and exalted, lit as if from within. Evoking the Thunderbird of First Nations’ truth, or the cross of the Christians. In vessels. In triptychs and trinities. Evoking passages; travels, journeys. 

Here, and between worlds.

Richard Watts. Canoe People Triptych. Rubber and gauze. 2011.

Richard Watts. Summer Boat Skin. Rubber and gauze.

in the space between belief and landscape....

Mhairi Killin Interview from UistFilm on Vimeo.

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.