Riverworks
A graphic image of an aerial map with peach-colored land masses on the right and upper left. The land masses have thin white lines conveying roads and plots of land. Cutting through the land masses is a textured bright green river. Overtop the aerial map are large black wavy letters spelling “Riverworks”.
About Riverworks
Prince Edward Island has over 1100 km of highly erodible sandstone coastline. The island’s shorelines face significant threat and degradation due to their sensitivity to sea level rise, storms and increased development.
Riverworks is an initiative by The River Clyde Pageant and Creative PEI in which three artists created outdoor public artworks exploring ecological transformation through their distinct creative practices. Each artwork was installed at one of three living shorelines in Charlottetown and Stratford.
Living Shorelines
Living shorelines are a nature-based solution to coastline protection. Mimicking natural processes, living shorelines slow erosion and are made with natural, biodegradable materials, such as woody debris, planted native species of trees, shrubs and grasses, all of which stabilize the shoreline. Living shorelines are a soft approach alternative to hard approaches which involve hardened structures such as seawalls, rock armouring or bulkheads. Although such structures may adequately mitigate shoreline retreat, the ecological damages that result from their presence can be significant. Living Shorelines protect people, create habitat and demonstrate a new working relationship with the more-than-human world.
A computer generated image of a living shoreline design. The foreground consists of a red sandy shore with a scattering of pebbles, shells and grass. Towards the bank of the shore logs, patches of grass, small round bushed and trees are planted strategically with a small wooden gazebo situated amidst them. Tall trees fill in the background with a blue sky.
The Organizers
The living shorelines initiative is led by the PEI Watershed Alliance, the City of Charlottetown, and the Town of Stratford, supported by the federal government’s Climate Action Fund.
The Artists
The three Riverworks artists were Doug Dumais, Kirstie McCallum and Alexis Bulman. Beginning in July 2021 and unfolding over the following months, each artist created installation-based artworks that engage with the living shoreline projects and the natural environment. Artworks by Dumais and McCallum were selected by the Riverworks jury as part of a competitive public call for submissions. Bulman’s artwork was supported in part by the UPEI ClimateSense program.
Shoreline Palimpsest
Artist: Doug Dumias
Location of artwork: QEH shoreline
Artwork dates: Two performances stints occurred, July 16th, July 17th, July 18th and September 18th and September 19th.
Shoreline Palimpsest is a photographic performance inspired by shoreline monitoring. For this project, Doug Dumais built a makeshift artist studio at the shore, which served as the site of a five-day performance. This mobile studio was a 6x6x6 white PVC cube which contained the essentials of a photographer’s studio: a table, camera, tripod, laptop, small backdrop, battery-powered printer, and lights. Photography and poetry documented the daily, hourly, or even the minute-by-minute changes along one section of the coast.
During these five days, Dumais moved his studio up and down the shore according to the tides and photographed the beach and the plants, sands, animals, flotsam, and other materials on it. After editing these images and printing them in the mobile studio, Dumais noted his observations and wrote original poems directly on the prints. During his performance Dumais engaged with the public, discussed living shorelines, and offered free prints to visitors. The project’s open-ended nature allowed for direct collaboration with the coastline and it’s continually changing environment.
Shoreline Palimpsest was centered around 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 was a reflective narrative of five days in the life of the coast. This micro-scale coastal inventory evoked 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.
This project is not a permanent public art installation. This performance was designed as a temporary intervention that ebbs, flows, retreats, and reacts as needed to the reality of coastal environments. In addition, the camera is an apparatus that creates images that mimic nature. The act of photography thus resembles living shorelines, which also mimic the natural world.
The goal of Shoreline Palimpsest is to temporarily intervene in the social landscape of the coastline without permanently adding or removing anything. Instead, what will be left behind is impressions upon visitors and a photographic and poetic archive that can be revisited or exhibited later.
A landscape-oriented photograph depicting a with brown hair, wearing a white jumpsuit walking a white cube structure through tall, luscious marrum grass towards water. Beyond the marrum grass is calm blueish-gray water, and a distant horizon line of a narrow land mass with deep-green foliage. The upper half of the photograph is a cloudless bluish-gray sky.
Doug Dumais
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.
Fascinated with human and animal interventions on the urban and natural landscape, Dumais uses the camera as a tool to facilitate radical acts of noticing and attentiveness. Using photography, he documents locations undergoing drastic changes such as construction sites, green spaces slated for development, or intangible spaces found in historical texts or digital software. In the studio, Dumais digitally manipulates his images by juxtaposing them with historical paintings, layering them with poetry, or transforming them into impossible spaces. This lyrical editing process draws out hidden narratives within his images and transforms them into material conduits for abstract concepts such as time, meaning-making, or the influence of one’s surroundings on identity formation.
This approach materializes the invisible connections between places and their inhabitants, artworks and their viewers, or texts and their readers. 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.
Social media: @dougdumais
Website: www.dougdumais.com
A landscape-oriented photograph depicting a white man with a mustache, light brown hair, wearing glasses, white sneakers, a white jumpsuit with a black camera around his next, and positioned with his hands in his pockets. The man is standing on a shoreline of reddish sand scattered with peddles, shells, seaweed and backed by tall green marram grass. Beyond the marrum grass is deep-green foliage, a stone wall, a white cubic structure, a gazebo and vibrant blue sky.
Lillian’s Place
Artist: Alexis Bulman
Location of artwork: Stratford Waterfront Park
Artwork dates: Permanent since July 14th, 2021
Lillian’s Place, is a sculpture, an art installation and an on-going collaboration by Alexis Bulman and the natural landscape.
This artwork took initial inspiration from a resident of Victoria by the Sea who lived in a cedar clad house beside a broken sea wall.
Constructed, it takes the form of a small cedar clad house, situated on an embankment where it lives in tandem with a living shoreline along the Hillsborough River. Lilian’s Place is designed to welcome human and non-human visitors alike; the hollow structure offers shelter to animals, and the roof peak offers a perch for shore birds. This sculpture is situated amidst a living shoreline, a meadow and 16 wild rose bushes, in the hopes of attracting pollinators. As years pass the structure will age and its once young, bright wood will turn a weathered grey color. 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 strives to find balance in a changing climate. It teeters on the edge of a shore, and co-exists with a living shoreline that stabilizes the littoral zone. It’s a place where flowers grow, and a place where flowers are laid in remembrance. It looks outwards to the sea and inwards to the land, striving to balance hope and loss, all while posing the question “How can we ensure the land we call home outlives the structures of houses?”
A landscape-oriented photograph showing a light-cedar shingled house-shaped structure, with no windows or doors, resting on wooden posts and situated in the center of the photograph. The wooden structure faces rightward, and is surrounded by luscious dark-green grass. Making up the background is vibrant blue water and a horizon line with a few buildings and a bridge to the right. The sky is cloudless and blue.
Alexis Bulman
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.
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). Currently, Bulman 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.
Social media: @alexisbulman
Website: www.alexisbulman.com
A landscape-oriented photo, centered is a smiling white woman with wavy blonde, wind-blown hair, wearing blue denim overalls and a red t-shirt and positioned with hands on hips. In the background to her right is a wooden shingled structure, and to her left out-of-focus grass and blueish-gray water is partially visible.
Pollinator Clock
Artist: Kirstie McCallum
Location of artwork: Tea Hill Park
Artwork dates: Installed in Spring 2022
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 reinhabit 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?
A landscape photograph depicting a circular pollinator garden filled with brown soil, some young plants and outlined in red rocks with a tall and narrow tree planted in the centre secured by two strings. Surrounding the pollinator garden is green grass, and a horizon line consisting of three trees and chain link fence. In the distance is pale blue-gray water with an even paler blue-gray sky.
Kirstie McCallum
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.
Social media: @kiss_off_katie
Website: https://a3164412bdde.myportfolio.com/portfolio-2020
A landscape-oriented photograph depicting Kirstie McCallum wearing a black hat, black shorts, black gloves and a turquoise t-shirt and kneeling in the grass planting a lanky bush. Behind Kirstie is a row of four evenly spaced dark trees, beyond those trees more distant folliage is visible with a light blue sky.
Riverworks Group Exhibition
Artists: Alexis Bulman, Doug Dumais, Kirstie McCullum
Loctaion: 2 Kent St, Beaconsfield Carriage House
Date: March 31st - April 4th, 2022 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM daily
The Riverworks group exhibition featured new artworks by Bulman, Dumais and McCullum, based on their initial Riverworks projects.
Through art as a form of citizen science, the artists have come together to reflect and continue exploring themes of adapting with, listening to and observing the river within the larger context of the Climate Crisis. We plan our lives around water, and water is constantly transforming and responding to the landscape and the communities situated around it. The artworks in this exhibition grapple with this give-and-take relationship and attempt to imagine a softer relationship of living with water.
In addition to the exhibition, a limited run of Risograph Riverworks zines will be free to the first 100 visitors, all visitors will have a chance to win thematic door prizes and there will be a special preview screening event with Eliza Knockwood!
A graphic image of an aerial map with peach-colored land masses on the right and upper left. The land masses have thin white lines conveying roads and plots of land. Cutting through the land masses is a textured bright green river. Over top the aerial map are large black wavy letters spelling “Riverworks”, below smaller black text reads “group exhibition Kirstie McCallum Doug Dumais Alexis Bulman Beaconsfield Carriage House 2 kent st March 31st-April 4th 10:00 AM - 7:00PM”
Riverworks Exhibition Accessibility
Riverworks is committed to ensuring as accessible an environment as possible for our four-day art exhibition at the Beaconsfield Carriage House. The following accessibility services are offered at this event:
The venue is wheelchair accessible, meaning: there are no raised steps between rooms, there are 2 accessible bathroom stalls, extra wide hallways and doors, 1 designated parking space, ramp access and room to maneuver around sculptures within the exhibition.
Service animals are welcome.
One attendant will always be in the venue.
All social media posts, photos and videos have image descriptions or captioning.
Exhibition text is written in plain language.
A described video tour of the exhibition will be posted online.
Social distancing and masks are encouraged.
The exhibition is free.
Barriers to note: There is no automatic door button at the front entrance, instead a site attendant will be on site to hold the door open.