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.

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.