The River Clyde Pageant is pleased to announce the artists selected for Riverworks!
Riverworks is a new initiative by The River Clyde Pageant and Creative PEI in which three artists will create artworks that explore ecological transformation through their own creative interpretations, to be installed alongside three living shorelines this summer and fall. Riverworks and the associated Living Shorelines projects are about to get started along Hillsborough River, so we are thrilled to finally announce the Riverworks artists!
Riverworks artist Kirstie McCallum
Artwork: Pollinator Clock
Location: Tea Hill Park
Artwork Description
Pollinator Clock is designed to give back to the earth, by delivering pollinator seed and soil enhancements to the meadow where it is installed, in Tea Hill. The work consists of 12 baskets (woven from red osier dogwood, raspberry cane, and other native plants) installed in the pattern of a circular clock-face. A sapling planted in the circle will represent the centre of a sundial. Each basket will be filled with local flower seed and bulbs mixed with soil, seaweed, and compost. Over time the baskets will break open, and the plants will disperse across the site. This will encourage the growth of wildflowers along the shoreline, inviting insects and birds to re-inhabit the area. The Pollinator Clock also functions as a space of contemplation for human visitors, who can walk or sit in the shelter of this organic sculpture.
The metaphor behind Pollinator Clock is a move from clock time to cyclical time. It begins with the rigidity of the human daily grind but as it decays it adapts to the slower cycle of the growing season. Pollinator Clock speaks to the urgency around climate adaptation: is time for change running out? Or can we use our arts and sciences to orient ourselves more closely to living systems, finding a balance between human and natural time?
image description: two circular graphics side by side against a white background. Left circle is a peach colour with a white birch tree in the centre. The perimeter of the circle is lined with 12 evenly spaced woven baskets. The right circle is purple and covered in a pattern of multi-coloured flowers with orange stems. In the centre of the circle is a birch tree with green leaves
Image description: Aerial photograph of Tea Hill Park, red sand fills the bottom left of the photograph with green and brown landscape filling the rest of the photograph. Green, turquoise, red and yellow lines and small white text are drawn over the photograph, mapping construction plans
Artist Bio:
Kirstie McCallum investigates human relationships with the more-than-human, through carefully researched sculptural installations. She blurs the boundaries between functional objects, organisms, and cultural artifacts, presenting them equally for the viewer’s gaze. By integrating organic and inorganic matter, her work asserts that human craftsmanship and natural growth-and-decay should be understood together, as aspects of wider planetary cycles. Kirstie has an MFA from OCAD University. She has exhibited her work at the New Gallery in Calgary, The Banff Centre Project Space, The Red Head Gallery in Toronto, and in a group durational performance at The Darling Foundry in Montreal. Kirstie works for NSCAD University and runs artistic projects in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
website: https://a3164412bdde.myportfolio.com/portfolio-2020
instagram: @kiss_off_katie
Image description: Photograph of Kirstie McCallum’s pale yellow art studio wall covered in 7 hanging bundles of plants with long brown stems and leafy bottoms. Centred on the wooden floor in the foreground sits a half woven basket, to it’s right lays long blades of green grass on the floor with more plant stems in a white bucket
Riverworks artist Doug Dumais
Artwork: Shoreline Palimpsest
Location: QEH Shoreline
Image description: At the top in large black font text reads “Project Support Sketches” smaller black text below reads “Doug Dumais - Riverworks Project Proposal”, below is a black and white photograph of a sand dune with patches of seaweed and grass . A white cube drawing sits on the sand in front of the dune
Artwork Description
Shoreline Palimpsest is a photographic performance inspired by shoreline monitoring. For this project, a makeshift artist studio will be located on the shore, which will serve as the site of a five-day performance. This mobile studio will consist of a 6x6x6-feet wooden frame which will contain the essentials of a photographer's studio: a table, camera, tripod, laptop, small backdrop, battery-powered printer, and lights. Photography and poetry will document the daily, hourly, or even minute-by-minute changes along one section of the coast.
During these five days, the studio will move up and down the shore according to the tides, photographing the beach and the plants, sands, animals, flotsam, and other materials along the way. After editing these images and then printing them in the mobile studio, observations will be noted through original poems written directly on the prints which will be given to visitors. The project's open-ended nature will allow for direct collaboration with the coastline.
Shoreline Palimpsest is about the value of careful and attentive observation of natural processes, as well as the difficulty of synthesizing and communicating these observations to the public. The result of this experiment will be a reflective narrative of five days in the life of the coast, which will serve as a record of the natural and artificial changes that took place. This micro-scale coastal inventory will evoke the vast, macro-scale erosion and transformation on shorelines over centuries or millennia: time frames that are incomprehensible on a human scale but are essential to consider in personal and political decisions.
Artist Bio
Doug Dumais is fascinated with human and animal interventions on the urban and natural landscape and uses the camera as a tool to facilitate radical acts of noticing and attentiveness. Dumais’ manipulated photographs of the ambient spaces humans occupy, traverse, or overlook are footholds in the process of becoming deeply aware of the overlapping histories and subjectivities present within the built and natural environment. Doug Dumais is an emerging photographer, art educator, and poet living in Prince Edward Island. A self-taught artist, Dumais holds a Masters degree in Art History from Concordia University (2019). He has exhibited at ARTCH Montréal, Galerie La Castiglione, and has a forthcoming solo exhibition with this town is small. His work is held in private collections in Ontario and Quebec. His scholarly writing, photography, and poetry have been featured in art publications across Canada and in the United States.
Instagram: @dougdumais
Website: www.dougdumais.com
Image description: Aerial photograph of QEH shoreline with light green, dark green and blue markers indicating environmental considerations as outlined by a legend in the bottom left of the image. Top half of the photograph shows grey city development and green areas, bottom half of photograph is dark green with small white text in bottom right corner. A title above the photograph in black font reads “Environmental Considerations”
Image description: two side by side photographs. Left photograph depicts an open brown cardboard box filled with white plumbing elbows, the box sits on a wooden floor. Right photograph is a test image, black and white ink on white photo paper depicts rocks on grass with black and white cursive writing overtop of the photograph
Riverworks artist Alexis Bulman
Artwork title: Lillian’s Place
Location of artwork: Stratford Waterfront Park
Image description: computer rendering of a light brown cedar shake clad house with no windows or doors, centred in the image and sitting on green grass with blue sky behind
Artwork Description:
Lillian’s Place is a sculpture, an art installation and a performance all at once. Constructed it will take the form of a small wooden house, situated on an embankment where it will live in tandem with a living shoreline along the Hillsborough River.
Lillian’s Place will experience the fullness of each season. Planted wildflowers will bloom, leaves will change colour and fall, and blankets of snow will cover the structure. As years pass the structure will age and it’s once young, bright wood will turn a weathered grey colour. Like dilapidated barns in the country, this artwork may someday slump and fall into the earth, returning to the place from which it’s building materials once came. If the living shoreline is supported and maintained, the established ecosystem should live on, nourished, not harmed, by Lillian’s Place.
Lilian's Place will be an artwork in flux, a place where flowers grow, and a place where flowers are laid in remembrance. It will teater on the edge of a shore, and co-exist with a living shoreline that stabilizes the shore, striving to balance hope and loss, life and death, and past and future, all while posing the question “How can we ensure the land we call home outlives the structures we call houses?”
Image description: Ariel schematic photograph of the Stratford Waterfront shoreline. Upper left of shows red sand and water, bottom right shows greenish brown fields. Running diagonally from bottom left to upper right of photograph is the shoreline with a series of red, yellow, green and blue markings and yellow arrows drawn overtop
Artist Bio:
Alexis Bulman is an interdisciplinary artist based in Epekwitk’/ Prince Edward Island. Through performance, sculpture, and installations she explores themes of trust, care, and the negotiations of access in public and private spaces. Bulman’s work relies on movement, gestures, and the instincts of her body to inform her conversations with places. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University. Most notably, Bulman has presented work at Artspace (ON), The Confederation Centre Art Gallery (PEI), and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (ON). She was the inaugural artist in residence for the Interrogating Access Residency supported by OBORO and Spectrum Productions (QC) and currently works as a ClimateSense Intern with The School of Climate Change and Adaptation, a position where she creates community-engaged artwork about Climate Change and Adaptation in PEI, such as her Riverworks project, Lillian’s Place.
Instagram: @alexisbulman
Artists website: http://www.alexisbulman.com/
Image description: Photograph of the artists workshop. In the foreground on a table is a sketchbook with house drawings, above it sits a computer with a house rendering on the screen. In the background is a wooden framed house structure and a garage door partially opened with sunlight coming through
Artworks by Dumais and McCallum were selected by the Riverworks jury as part of a competitive public call for submissions. Bulman's artwork is supported in part by the UPEI ClimateSense program.
All three public artworks engage with processes of ecological transformation and will accompany living shorelines along the Hillsborough River.
The living shorelines initiative is led by the PEI Watershed Alliance, the City of Charlottetown, and the Town of Stratford. This initiative, along with Riverworks, is funded by the Federal Government’s Climate Action Fund.
Pollinator Clock, Shoreline Palimpsest and Lillian’s Place are all currently underway, with installations and performances scheduled to begin in mid July. To keep up to date on performance dates and artwork announcements, and to see these exciting artworks come to life, follow The River Clyde Pageant and Creative PEI and the Riverworks artists on social media!
@riverclydepageant
@creativepei