From February to July, 2024 I had the opportunity to participate in an intradisciplinary, creative-critical enquiry towards an Experimental Ecology of Line with Camilla Nelson, a PhD and founding editor of Singing Apple Press, whose work explores the materiality of language in relation to the other-than-human world.
Ecology of Line really resonated with me because I see my environmental art projects as entwined in line. While I initially thought about above-ground lines like linear perspective, the horizon, property and plot lines, I soon added notions of thready roots and tendrils of my beans, and the shapes of living and dead organic matter in the soil beneath my feet. Printmaking is also a particularly line-oriented medium.
Each month, using Tim Ingold’s taxonomy of line as a framework, the group of artists, poets, writers, scholars, and creatives explored nature though the lenses of threads, dots and blobs, traces, weaves and transcriptions. Through group discussion, sharing, and generous feedback, we each strove to produce a creative work – be it an image, poem or text, video, or other construct of some type – that encapsulated our individual creative thinking that month. In the summer each participant was invited to submitted two pieces for presentation in a group exhibition. This fall Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line was launched, curated by Camilla Nelson, and including works by Amanda Brown, Carol Dalton, Susanne Eules, Nancy Holmes, Petra Kuppers, Boya Liang, Karen Neuberg, Mary Newell, Chris Partridge, Linda Russo, Beth Shepherd, Jennifer Spector, Natalie Vestin, Tessa Waite, and Sarah Westcott.
The exhibition presents a selection of work in four groupings related to Ingold’s taxonomy of line: TRACE, THE THREAD & THE WEAVE, DOTS & BLOBS, and TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF LINE. I have work in the first and the last sections. In TRACE I have my artist book series of prints called DROUGHT. In TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF LINE you can view my two-minute video poem: Plot 46: The Unterwelt. Please enjoy the entire innovative collection of work.
I enjoyed this collaborative form of artmaking so much – it is like being on an international residency — that I have signed up for the ADVANCED EXPERIMENTAL ECOLOGY OF LINE, designed for “towards an experimental ecology of line” graduates.
Swap participants picking up the signatures at the March CBBAG-OV meeting at the Carleton University Book Arts Lab
“A Special Place” is the theme for the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artist Guild, Ottawa (CBBAG-OV) 2023-24 Signature Exchange or “swap”. In the swap, each of the ten participants, prepared “signatures” – the name given to a nested group of pages in bookbinding lingo. Other than size and theme, anything goes. Each of the ten swappers received nine other signatures to be bound into a unique artist book. It is always exciting to see the results!
The Four prints included in Plot 46: Beans, Beetles, and the Soil Biome
Plot 46: Beans, Beetles, and the Soil Biome represents “my special place” and is my submission to the Swap. My four-print set of prints represents different dimensions of Plot 46, a 400 square foot allotment at Maple Hill Urban Farm in Ottawa that I have been cultivating since 2022. Plot 46 is also the eponymous name for my multi-year art-research project on regenerative vegan organic agriculture. I am documenting my project through printmaking, writing, poetry, and video. The first print in the set depicts a traditional landscape view of my plot in its first year. The second is a picture of beans, my main crop, that I harvest, dry, and eat over the winter, always saving seed for the next season. Plants capture the sun’s energy and that energy is transferred into the soil via root exudates. The exudates fuel the bounty of organisms that comprise the soil food web – the secret sauce of healthy soil. Beetles and worms represent all the visible and invisible organisms that coexist in a pesticide-free agricultural ecosystem. These four images, each 5X10 inches, were printed on fine art paper and constructed into an accordion format for the exchange.
Spine view
Other book artists contributed their own visual stories about their favourite places — from bed and bath, childhood memories, to personal retreats, in a wide range of media. Once I received the other nine signatures, I got to work making them into a book. I decided to make a Coptic book because of its historic significance. The Coptic book is an archaic form of bookbinding used by early Egyptian Christians (the Copts), originating between the 2nd and 4th century. Coptic bindings are characterized by one or more signatures sewn through their folds and attached to each other with chain stitch linkages across the spine. The advantage of Coptic binding is that the book can open flat and does not require any adhesives. I made covers for my book using hand-made paste paper over cardboard.
The contributors to the book in alphabetical order are: Valerie Bridgeman, Deidre Hierlihy, Anna McFaul, Tiffany Moore, Ruth Nuesch, Wendy Parlow, Diane Parkin, Susan Pinard, Madeleine Rousseau, and Beth Shepherd. A big thank you goes to Madeleine Rousseau and Diedre Hierlihy for coordinating this year’s swap and to all the very creative, talented, and generous people who participated.
I wanted to share the work of my fellow artists. So to do this I made a “Flip Book.” Double click on the book to start, then click to stop and start.
My 3D print Now you see me, now you don’t! is a lenticular or agamographic artwork that uses optical illusion to create changes when you look at it from a different angle. The first lenticular artwork I saw many years ago was in a surprisingly memorable medical history exhibition in a forgotten European museum. Among sculptures of cutaways of pregnant women, depictions of treatments such as bloodletting, and various scary medical instruments of the day, I remember walking back and forth in front of a large oil painting watching in amazement as the picture changed depending on my vantage point.
Figure 1 – By Jean Francois Nicéron – https://books.google.nl/books?id=r1T-rypHaRgC&pg=RA1-PA74#v=onepage&q&f=false, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64685694
The technique of lenticular imaging first developed in the Renaissance was called tabula scalata (picture ladder) and was used for such things as double portraiture. See figure 1. The intellectuals and artists of the time were very interested in perspective. Interest in this type of optics was rekindled after the Industrial Revolution with the introduction of stereoscopes, kinescopes and other various three-dimensional and motion picture machines designed to display images and the photographs to the masses. By the early 20th century, lenticular postcards became a niche novelty at the same time motion pictures were exploding. In my childhood I remember seeing cards, key fobs, and pens with pictures of moving dancing women. Despite these rather frivolous uses, the concepts of interweaving images taken from different angles continued to fuel research in colour photography, 3D animation, holography, virtual reality, right up to today’s metaverse.
As a member of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild (CBBAG) I had the opportunity to step back in time and learn how to make my own lenticular artwork, transforming 2D prints into a “moving” sculptural artwork. I used two prints I had previously made – one was a linocut beetle and the other was some Chine colléed paper from a failed print. I prepared a scaffold base (Figure 2) by folding stone paper accordion style and painting it black. I then cut the two prints into strips and glued them in place on the scaffold, one set on the left side of the fold and the other print on the right side.
Figure 2 – The accordion scaffold
The resulting piece — Now you see me, now you don’t! — is 7.5 X 11.5 X .75 inches in a 9 X 20-inch shadow box frame.
Figure 3 – The mounted piece face on
Thanks to the lenticular mounting system, the beetle appears and disappears depending on the viewer’s angle as seen in the short video.This made this work a perfect submission for the exhibition “Picturing the Invisible: Sights/ Sites Unseen” held at the Nepean Creative Arts Centre in late 2023 and will be exhibited at the getting to know you exhibition at the ASP Gallery, Ottawa October 3 – November 27, 2024.
References:
“The history of Lenticular Printing – Holographic Images from the Past, Present and Future.” YouTube, uploaded by Jared Hoffman’s Lenticular Printing Masterclass, 25 Oct 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxvYGOZF7L4
“Tabula scalata.” Wikipedia, updated 11 Feb 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_scalata
In March 2023 I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and had the pleasure of seeing Edgar Degas’s The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (circa 1878-81; cast A.A. Herbrard, 1922 (Paris)). I have seen this sculpture a number of times and I am always struck by its uniqueness — the contrasting materiality of durable bronze and the fragility of the tattered tutu and silk hair ribbon. I was especially pleased this time at the attractiveness of the little dancer’s new tutu.
A few years before my last visit, Glen Peterson, conservator at the Met, had been charged with researching what dancers wore when the original sculpture was created to make the tutu more historically accurate. Peterson determined that the bouffant skirts worn by ballerinas of the day were knee-length and made of multiple layers of tarlatan, a starched open-weave cotton. He painstakingly hand-crafted the new longer tutu which was installed in 2018 (1).
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is not recognized as a sculptor but as an impressionist painter in oils and pastels. Nevertheless, he did undertake some sculpture in wax and clay of his favourite subjects: ballerinas, nudes, and horses. He exhibited La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans at the sixth Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in 1881. Like the Impressionist paintings of his peers, Degas’s work broke many conventions of classical art of the period. Even more controversial, the sculpture was modelled in wax and wore a real bodice, stockings, shoes, a tulle skirt, and a hair wig with a satin ribbon – materials not used in fine art. Everything but the tutu and ribbon was set in wax (2). The work received much criticism and the sculpture was not shown again during Degas’s lifetime.
Upon Degas’s death in 1917, La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans and other sculptural pieces were found in his studio. His heirs authorized a series of bronze casts to be made at the Paris foundry of A. A. Hébrard et Cie. It is not certain how many copies of La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans were made but they may be found in many gallery collections. The original wax sculpture is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Camille Laurens in her recent book Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, addresses the life of Degas’s subject, Marie van Goethem (1865-unknown) ― a young girl from a poor family living in Paris and training at the Paris Opera with hopes of a better life. While at the Opera, Marie was engaged to model for Degas. In late 19th century Paris it was common for young dancers and models to be subjected to sexual abuse by older male artists. Degas was known to be a celibate misogynist and therefore very unlikely to have forced himself sexually on his model; nevertheless, their relationship would have been fraught with gendered power imbalances (3).
Ballet in 19th century Paris was not the refined high-brow art form we know today. Girls as young as eight years old became ballerinas, working ten to twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week engaged in strenuous rehearsals, performances, and other related chores. After reaching “sexual maturity” at thirteen, girls were often paid to have sex with men waiting in the opera’s wings. The girls were nicknamed “les petits rats” because they were known to transmit STDs. Degas’s disdain for women, and in particular ballet dancers, is sculpted into Marie’s features to portray moral degeneracy rather than a youthful vibrancy. Audiences derided the ugliness of the pigmented beeswax and clothing and the subject herself (3).
In searching through the Paris Opera’s account books, Laurens found that in 1882, a year after the completion of Degas’s sculpture, Marie was docked in pay due to absence and eventually fired from her dancing post (possibly due to time spent modelling for Degas?) (3). After that, the real little dancer is lost to history.
I made two prints for the Expressive Movement: Dance, Rhythm and Flow Exhibition at the Connective Gallery in the Nepean Creative Arts Centre, March 4 to June 24, 2024. The first, Little Dancer, is a drypoint print after a photo I took of the sculpture at the Met in 2023. I printed it with black ink and collaged some pink Mizutama tissue covering the bodice and tutu. I wanted to bring her to life!
Little Dancer Drypoint and collage 8×6 inches
At the same time that Degas was working on the Little Dancer sculpture, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey were experimenting with photography to help understand animals and humans in motion. Marey, a physiologist, invented a camera system that allowed the capture of movement on a single plate called chronophotography (4). In Little Dancer Redux, I imagine Marie revived, leaving her static fourth position pose, and lifting her right leg up while extending both her arms outward. I represent each moving limb in three positions as if captured with chronophotography. To differentiate the imagined movements from the original print, I used a trace monotype technique and pink ink.
Little Dancer Redux Drypoint, trace monotype, and collage 9 ½ x 7 ½ inches
It is my hope that by celebrating The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen we are paying tribute to this young person whose life history is lost but who lives in the minds of all that see her. To Marie van Goethem!
(2) Clare Vincent, “Edgar Degas (1834–1917): Bronze Sculpture.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–(October 2004). . http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dgsb/hd_dgsb.htm .
(3) Priscilla Frank, “The Story Of Degas’ ‘Little Dancer’ Is Disturbing, But Not In The Way You Expect”, Huffpost, Nov 21, 2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/degas-little-dancer-camille-laurens_n_5bec3dc5e4b0783e0a1ed801. The article references Camille Laurens, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story behind Degas’s Masterpiece. Translated by Willard Wood, Other Press, 2020.
In the spring of 2023, the Ottawa School of Art Orleans extended a special invitation to the Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective to put on a group exhibition in their fabulous gallery at the Shenkman Arts Centre. OGPC worked with the OSAO gallery coordinator, Nadine Argo, to establish an interesting theme: Print Pairings: Colour vs Black and White (May 14-June 24, 2023). Participating artists were asked to provide a pair of prints – one in black and white and one in colour – that would demonstrate how they use colour or black and white to convey separate meanings, place different emphases, create distinct moods, or express diverse emotions around a related theme or image. Because the OSAO gallery has no rules about framing, this was an ideal opportunity for OGPC members to submit larger pieces without incurring the prohibitive costs of framing.
Figure 1: The Print Pairings Vernissage, May 28, 2023
My Submission: Planet Earth Series
A couple of years ago, I made a big woodcut on a piece of scrap 34 by 25-inch plywood. I cut a textured circle sitting positioned high on the wood sheet — a nod to the iconic Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968. After making a proof of the woodcut, I just forgot about it – it was too big and there weren’t many opportunities for this topic. Then for Earth Day this year I pulled it out and used a photo of the plate as the background for a concrete poem acknowledging Earth Day 2023 entitled “Earth Day 1970-2013 We’ve come a long way, baby!” (Figure 2).
Figure 2: “Earth Day 1970-2013 We’ve come a long way, baby!”
For Print Pairings I used the plate as a tableau for reflecting on the climate wars taking place on our fragile planet. The interplay between the black & white and the coloured prints represents the global struggle between petrochemical and green-tech politico-economic behemoths duking it out. We now recognize the harms of our dependence on fossil fuels and climate change. As we struggle to reduce our global CO2 footprint, new technologies have their own negative consequences that result from mining of minerals, metals and rare earths required for green energy. And despite a shift to “green” energy, petrochemical giants continue to extract oil, coal, and natural gas.
Figure 3: Planet Earth pair hanging at Shenkman: Petro Planet on the left and Extracted Earth on the right
Petro Planet is a black-and-white relief print starkly reflecting on humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels. Humanity’s power to affect planetary systems accelerated after World War II with expansion of global production, especially in the petrochemical sector. Although many scientists, politicians, and people everywhere continue to express concern about the impacts on the fragile blue planet, global fossil fuel interests continue to extract oil, coal, and gas to fuel an overheating Earth.
Extracted Earth is a colour relief print with collage elements reflecting on the negative impacts of extracting scarce or difficult-to-obtain materials needed for new green technologies. As pressure to limit CO2 rises, many nations are transitioning to a renewable energy infrastructure including solar panels, wind turbines, and battery-driven vehicles. Transition to green technology requires the extraction or recycling of often toxic metals, minerals, and rare-earth substances that severely impact workers and environments where they are mined, processed, and if applicable, recycled.
In 2022 members of the Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective began our project on Migration, which we all agreed was a timely and important subject. What surprised us all was the variety of perspectives we took: from the vast animal journeys; migrants fleeing from hostilities or immigrants seeking new possibilities; to more ethereal migrations.
The Hanging Team, Beth Shepherd, Madeleine Rousseau, Shealagh Pope, and Freida Hjartarson , at La Fab April 19th
I will quote here from the news release prepared by the La Fab Sur Mill Arts Centre where are exhibition will be showing from April 21 to June 4, 2023:
Migration has always been part of the human condition. Over history, people have moved to seek new opportunities such as a higher-paying job, a better social or cultural setting, or a chance at an education (Deidre Hierlihy: Margaret with jackrabbit (1937)). Human migration too often, however, is not by choice, but by necessity. As of May 2022, it is estimated that more than 100 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced as a result of conflict, persecution, human rights violations, and violence. Roughly 42 per cent of those displaced are children (Murray Dineen, The Littlest Migrant). The act of migration can be perilous. Migrants risk their lives, and some never reach safe haven. Many are not welcomed when they do arrive (Lynda Turner, Reverberations).
Migration is also an ongoing, defining pattern for many animal species. Migratory animals move in response to changing seasons or to use different habitats over their life cycle (Patricia Slighte, Aloft). Many of these migrations are awe-inspiring feats of endurance (Shealagh Pope, On the Move). However, changes to the landscape can threaten the ongoing existence of species that depend on movement for their survival (Beth Shepherd, Flow: Recruitment and Escapement). Canadians living in inner cities are seeing their access to green space gradually diminish as more infrastructure is built where parks and trees used to be. The migration of green space further out of our ever-sprawling built environment is worrisome for the long-term sustainability of these urban neighbourhoods (Madeleine Rousseau, Vivre sans toi?). In addition to figurative works, the exhibition includes conceptual and abstract interpretations that explore how movement between different realms or media can be represented as migrations (Freida Hjartarson, Migration).
The artists participating in “Migration” raise timely and important political, economic, ecological, and social issues. This exhibition invites the viewer to consider their own relationship or history with migration. The exhibition also allows viewers to gain a better understanding of the distinctive characteristics and vast potential of print-based art and its role in fostering constructive dialogue around contemporary issues.
Centre des arts La Fab sur Mill Arts Centre
This is a video of the hung show prepared by Richard Austin, Visual Arts director of La Fab Arts Centre.
I have recently become interested in concrete poetry – where the visual form augments or sometimes supplants the linguistic meaning. On doing further research I learned that concrete poetry is usually associated with the international Concrete Poetry Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement emerged from the work of Eugen Gomringer of Switzerland and the Brazilian Noigandres group, and quickly spread around the world. Although the Concrete Poetry Movement lost its momentum by the 1970s, its legacy and influence live on.
Typically, concrete poets work with the visual power of the page that results from the shape and placement of typographical elements vis-à-vis the whitespace. Applying the notion of concrete to any artform acknowledges its materiality and how that materiality informs its function and meaning. I felt this could be useful in drawing analogies that aid in understanding the materiality of the altered landscape, the loss of species, and the overarching politics of climate change.
This spring I had the opportunity to do some typesetting at the Carleton University Book Arts Lab as part of a creative writing workshop on climate change. In March and April, I typeset my poem “Elegy for the Silver Eel” in a visually expressive form.
Intrigued by duality of Concrete Poetry at the intersection of language and image, I typeset and printed:
“Elegy for the Silver Eel” as a poem – the shaped text with a title on the top and author at the bottom right, in a literary fashion; and
Elegy for the Silver Eel as an object of visual art, where I removed the typeset title author and hand-signed each print at the bottom in the manner of a fine art print.
Figure: Duality of Concrete Poetry
The font for both versions is Helvetic Italic which I thought contributed to the sense of flow. Once typeset, each version was printed using the Vandercook letterpress on 6-inch square artist tiles (Strathmore Bristol, vellum finish, 100 lb.). To read about my process, please click here.
Many thanks go to Nadia Bozak, professor in the English Dept., and Larry Thompson, Master Printer at the Book Arts Lab, Carleton University, for this opportunity.
I made a video of a talk I gave at the University of Ottawa English Graduate Student Association Conference Looking Through the Anthropocene: Exploring Climate Change and Global Uncertainties, held March 10-12, 2023.
Starting with Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, I discuss concrete both as a ubiquitous building material accounting for around half of all human-made things in the world today, and as an innovative substance for turning creative ideas into reality, as it appeared to be in the early to mid 20th century.
The latter would have no doubt inspired the use of the word by the Concrete Poetry Movement active in the 1950s and 1960s. By integrating image and language, these international poets turned poetry into functional objects. Although not critically appreciated in its time, concrete poetry has continued as a poetic form. I discuss my own discovery of concrete poetry and prose, and read three pieces I have written:
– “Horizon is” (2021). “Horizon is” is the soundtrack on my video Horizon Lost and Found that may be found on this website.
– “Elegy for the Silver Eel” (2022), which I wrote last year and presented at the River Institute, and
– “Ode to Ordovician Limestone” (2023), which I wrote this year for a creative writing course I am taking at Carleton University––which won first place in the university-wide annual Songwiting and Poetry Competition!.
“You are what you eat” is a well-known adage that has been used by mothers and health food advocates for generations to advise everyone to eat healthy food to ensure a healthy body. The relationship between food and well-being first came into use in 1826 when French lawyer Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante: “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” [Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are]. In 1863/4, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote: “Der Mensch ist, was er ißt”[Man is what he eats]. The expression “you are what you eat” came into general use in the English language when American nutritionist Victor Lindlahr published his 1942 book You Are What You Eat: how to win and keep health with diet. He also hosted a radio show of the same name that aired into the 1950s. (1)
Figure 1: You Are What You Eat Logo/ Album Cover, 1968
In the 1960s and 70s, you are what you eat took on new meaning in the hippy era when it became associated with macrobiotic food and return-to-the-land movements. It was also the ironic title of a little known 1968 counter-culture film and soundtrack produced by Barry Feinstein. (2) The film, You are what You Eat, definitely did not promote healthy eating or lifestyle, but did capture the zeitgeist of the 1960s California hippy scene with its psychedelic representation of sex, drugs and rock and roll. (3)
The logo for the film and album cover art shows an imaginative representation of the mouth of the mason jar and a protruding tongue. (4) In interviews quoted in the WFMU blog, cast member Carl Franzoni stated that it was his tongue that served as the model for the you are what you eat logo; and, he claims, his tongue was the inspiration for the Rolling Stones’ famous tongue and lips logo (Figure 2), developed for the Stones’s 1972 European tour. (5) Unfortunately for Franzoni, his claimed influence on the famous Rolling Stones’ logo, as well as the film, have slipped into obscurity. Meanwhile, the adage “you are what you eat” remains popular and is still widely used in the diet and health food sectors. (6)
Figure 2: John Pasche’s initial design for the well-known lips and tongue logo of the Rolling Stones introduced in 1971
Since 1970, the world’s population has more than doubled. Providing healthy food, or even not so healthy food, for over eight billion people, has its challenges. Food systems are responsible for more than a third of the greenhouse gases worldwide. Agriculture requires energy, fertilizers and land. Food processing, packaging and distribution systems, especially refrigeration, uses a lot of energy too.
Award-winning German documentary Taste the Waste (2011, directed by Valentin Thurn) claims that we live in a state of over-abundance as typified by grocery retailers that put too much blemish-free food in front of their customers. (8) More food than can possibly be consumed is being produced, and sent thousands of miles, only to be dumped in landfills as it passes the sell-by date. Hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of food is wasted every year. Nutritional experts and the general public are recognizing the importance of eating healthy food, especially increased quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables. Many consumers complain they can’t afford to buy fresh healthy produce at grocery store prices. Maybe high costs could be reduced if less food was procured and then thrown away.
Taste the Waste describes how wasting half our food production also has a significant impact on the world’s climate. When food decomposes at a garbage dump, it releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas with a short-term warming potential many times higher than carbon dioxide. This enlarges the already high carbon footprint of the global agro-food systems. systems.
Although taste the waste is not yet a food adage, maybe it should be. It can serve as a powerful metaphor for problems in our industrialized and globalized food production systems in which we all play a part. It seems to me that reducing waste is an important first step in providing more sustainable and healthy food at affordable prices while reducing our global carbon footprint.
Taste-the-Waste Diptych
In my mind, “taste the waste” brought the “you are what you eat” mason jar logo to mind. By replacing the mason jar with a garbage can, my “Taste the Waste” image was conceived. I did a quick sketch and turned it into a drypoint print using a scrap PVC gift card as a matrix. (9) I printed a test run of five prints using my little Open Press Project 3D printed press (Figures 3a and b).
Figure 3a: Printing on the Open Press Project mini printer and 3b: the first run of five drypoint prints
Here is my final product – Taste-the-Waste Diptych (figure 4). Enjoy!
Figure 4: Beth Shepherd, Taste-the-WasteDiptych (2022), two drypoint prints, one hand-coloured
References: (1) Phrase Finder, https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/you-are-what-you-eat.html, accessed 2022-11-13. (2) You Are What You Eat, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDjRoKIvYVU. (3) “You are what you eat,” WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, 2007, https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/you_are_what_yo.html, accessed 2022-11-13. (4) “You are what you eat,” WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, 2007, https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/you_are_what_yo.html, accessed 2022-11-13. (5) Tongue and lips logo, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_and_lips_logo. (6) You Are What You Eat appears in the title of a number of books, videos, blogs and television shows, such as a 2022 reality TV Series featuring Trisha Goddard, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16965218/. (7) FAO, Food systems account for more than one third of global greenhouse gas emissions, March 9, 2021, https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1379373/icode/. (8) Taste the Waste, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtPCoMtr7Lk. (9) The gift-card conundrum: Convenience with an environmental cost, CBC News, Dec 19, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-newsletter-gift-card-holidays-1.5402807
Beth Shepherd, Just Another Derecho Day, 2022, Etching
This artist proof is my submission to the Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective Gallery Exhition called Climate Change — A Pressing Matter. The exhibition runs at the Nepean Creative Arts Center, 35 Stafford Rd., Ottawa, from October 20 to February 23, 2023. An edition of 10 have been submitted to the Saskatchewan Printmakers’ 2022 International Print Exchange (SKIPE).
The image depicts the aftermath of Ottawa’s May 2022 derecho when trees were toppled into the artist’s daughter’s pool, destroying the new fence and lawn furniture. I wonder whether living with more frequent extreme weather events will become yet another “new normal,” as signified by the awaiting chaise longue and cocktail beside the tree-strewn pool.
Ottawa Hydro described the Derecho as Ottawa’s biggest storm yet. “With winds up to 190 km/h, the powerful derecho storm that devastated Ottawa on Saturday, May 21, left a trail of destruction like nothing Ottawa has ever seen or experienced before. From severe damage to property and Ottawa’s urban forest, the harm to our electrical infrastructure makes this storm our biggest yet; significantly worse than the 1998 Ice Storm and the 2018 tornadoes.” (B. Morgan, June 29, 2022, https://hydroottawa.com/en/blog/derecho-our-biggest-storm-yet.)
Much of the city experienced power outages, ranging in length from hours to more than a week in some sections of the city. Stittsville and areas in Ottawa’s south were particularly hard hit in terms of damage. My daughter and her partner were watching the storm whip their backyard. All of a sudden two neighbouring trees came uprooted and toppled into their pool, crushing their newly constructed metal fencing and their lawn furniture.
As quick as it came, the storm was gone leaving in its wake so much destruction. In Just Another Derecho Day, I imagine a backyard pool with a fallen tree; a pool-side recliner and a cocktail sit ready for the homeowner. Will climate change make severe weather events more everyday – something we learn to take in stride? Of course, I am being ironic. As severe weather, fires, floods, heat domes, droughts, food and water shortages, pandemics, wars, mass migrations, loss of species, and myriad anthropogenic calamities overtake our lives, it will be harder – even for the privileged – to just sit by the pool.
A first step is considering our own emergency preparedness to cope with the inevitable. We must also demand that authorities invest in “hardening” the infrastructure. After the ice storm I was terrified of being without power. It was winter and we feared frozen pipes bursting. Afterwards we converted our wood fireplace to gas. Other storms generally have come in warm weather. Power outages mean food loss. In May, I was glad to have my natural gas barbecue to boil water and cook food. We are being encouraged to eliminate fossil fuels but in the case of emergencies it has been a life saver. As we become more dependent on “green energy,” governments and utilities have to ensure those systems are as robust as natural gas.
Regressive hunting legislation and barbaric population management practices put cormorants in the cross-hairs
Beth Shepherd, Cormorant 1/1 (2022), Monotype
In June 2021 while kayaking along the eastern shore of the Ottawa River, I stopped to watch the elegant beauty of a flock of double-crested cormorants flying effortlessly above the river along the shoreline. Just a month later on July 31, 2020, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry announced a province-wide fall hunting season for cormorants from September 15th to December 31st with a daily bag limit is 15 birds under the authority of a small game licence. (1) I wondered why anyone would want to hunt cormorants which are not considered game animals.
I have created two prints to draw attention to the plight of the double-crested cormorant in Ontario in light of the new legislation. Cormorant 1/1 (2022) is a monotype of a bird with its back to the viewer looking out along the shoreline. Dead Cormorant 1/1 (2022) is a monotype with ink and collaged plastic. Using a stencil, the blank space signifies the absence of the dead cormorant surrounded by shotgun shells – the evidence of the carnage.
Beth Shepherd, Dead Cormorant 1/1 (2022), Monotype with collaged plastic (shoot gun shells)
They pieces are on display until October 23, 2022 as part of the Painterly Printmaking exhibition at the Connective Gallery at the Nepean Creative Arts Centre.
From a protected species to a target of wanton hunting
The population of cormorants has been growing in Ontario for decades and so has a call for management by property owners and the Ontario Federation for Hunters and Anglers (OFAH) (1). Cormorants are colony nesters and the sites of colonies can be alarming since their acidic waste and ungainly nests cause some die-back of trees at the water’s edge where they make their nests. Once near extinction before the ban of DDT and protected under the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act of 1997, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Amendment Act (Double-Crested Cormorants) was enacted in 2016 to permit the hunting and trapping of double-crested cormorants (2). Since then many environmental and animal advocacy voices have spoken up in protest on grounds that the population of this native species is not excessive and still in rebound from near-extinction; that the claim of decimating sport fish populations is false, and that in areas where the population is heaviest, alternative more humane ways of management could be used (3). Legal experts also advise that precedents set in the legislation — allowing shooting from boats and leaving dead carcasses — present dangers for both wildlife and humans in the affected areas (4).
A reminder of the larger cultural context of “pristine nature”
With the continued loss of habitat, it is no wonder that humans and cormorants are coming into conflict and rather than letting nature take its course, humans want to manage nature. This has been particularly poignant at Pelee Island National Park where Parks Canada has been undertaking culls of cormorants on Middle Island from 2008 to 2021 to preserve a Carolinian forest ecosystem (5 & 6). The culling occurs in the spring during breeding season with sharp-shooters aiming at the nesting cormorants reluctant to leave their eggs and chicks (7). See the video showing the inhuman methods of population management within what is supposed to be a bird sanctuary.
The debate is ongoing whether population management is indeed needed. If it is, can’t people charged on our behalf with protecting the environment find less regressive and violent ways than shooting and maiming birds on the nest? How we are treating double-crested cormorants calls to mind how colonizers treated indigenous peoples when governments first decided to set aside portions of “pristine nature” in perpetuity as conservation areas and parks.
I am ending this post with an image of the double-crested cormorant from John James Audubon’s Birds of America, printed between 1827 and 1838. Although beautiful, these works are tainted with past and present cultural concerns about racism and exclusion in conservation movements (8).
John James Audubon, Double-crested Cormorant, from The Birds of America
(2) Bill 205, Fish and Wildlife Conservation Amendment Act (Double-Crested Cormorants), 2016, https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-41/session-1/bill-205.
(3) For examples, Ontario Nature https://ontarionature.org/ontarios-cormorants-blog/, https://www.animalalliance.ca/new-cormorant-video-exposes-cruelty/; Nature Canada, https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/cheskey-ontarios-cormorant-hunt-is-based-on-pandering-rather-than-science; Animal Alliance of Canada, https://www.animalalliance.ca/campaigns/other-campaigns/double-crested-cormorant-slaughter/.
In 2021 The Ottawa Riverkeeper made an appeal to help save the American eels that were facing extirpation from the Ottawa River Watershed. In addition to a donation I decided to make eels a subject of my practice. The image is monotype where the swirls of white in black ink capture the movement of eels caught in a net or weir.
Beth Shepherd, Eels Caught Up, Monotype
This spring, a group of Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective printmakers began work on a ‘Migration in Print’ project. Migration is timely as political, economic, and social conditions, exacerbated by climate change, disrupt long-standing animal movements and force ever more people to flee their homes. Since American Eels exhibit a reproductive pattern of migration inked to their spawning cycles, I decided my work would fit right in.
Wanting to do something for Culture Days (September 23 to October 16, 2022), three of us decided to make some videos taking a behind-the-scenes look at our creative processes in making new migration-themed works. Wanting to also put on an in-person Culture Days event, we approached Carleton University’s Book Arts Lab. Larry Thompson, generously provided space for an exhibition and an in-person event on October 14 (1-4pm). Here is the link to our Cultures Day Hub with descriptions for our three online and two in-person events.
The artwork I made for Culture Days is called Flow: Recruitment and Escapement.
Flow: Recruitment and Escapement, 244 X 91.5 cm, Mixed media collagraph print
Yellow eels enter freshwater habitats making their way upstream (“recruitment”) where they remain feeding and hibernating until they reach sexual maturity decades later. Sexually mature females, now blackish and silver, head downstream towards the ocean (“escapement”). To render the existential fragility of this species I employ the ephemeral qualities of Japanese mulberry paper.
In my video I talk about the plight of the American eel and present the behind-the-scenes steps in the production of Flow: Recruitment and Escapement.
