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.

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.

the craft....

Emilie, Karl and Dean Mattson. The Craft (detail).
Willow branches, cow placenta, fibre glass.
2006

Two young men and their mother paddle silently across a moonlit pond in a canoe.  It’s a performance and an image with echoes throughout human history – the family, the boat, the journey.  Displacement, travel, migration; gestation, birth, death, transcendence – a whole life journey is summed up in it.

The mother, in this case, is painter and mixed-media sculptor Emilie Mattson; and the canoe is an artwork completed in collaboration with her two sons, Dean and Karl, each an artist in his own right.  Made from willow branches stretched with cow placentas and coated with fibreglass, it is called simply The Craft.



Reprinted from Art of the Peace magazine, Issue 12,Spring/Summer 2009. Find the complete article here.

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.

if these tears to boats of salt would turn...

Motoi Yamamoto. Fountain of Remembrance (after raining).
Salt installation. 2000
Photos from http://www.motoi.biz/english/e_top/e_top.html

If I could mould these

tears to boats of salt, would they

float my grief away?

2012-12-29