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.

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.