Gros Morne Artist in Residence!

Hello All! There has been radio silence on this blog for a little while now, on account of I have a lovely new website! So, you can see all my art here: www.jacquelinebradley.com.au. And that means I have turned this blog over to a log of my residencies. Here is the first: I am in Newfoundland! The first few days are all in one here, as I have no net at the house, but I'll try to get over here and post every couple of days til I get home. Hurrah!

Blog entries 1 – 8

Day 1 – 24^th July

And

Day 2 – 25^th July

This is an announcement: Because there is no Internet in the house, I am writing this entry in retrospect. As a result, these two days have become one. Just like the backstreet boys’ song (or was it Spice Girls?) Anyway, here are the key things that happened:

1. After the two days of travel from Halifax in car and boat, I arrived last night to the artists in Residence house.  A thunderous hurrah!

2. I met the excellent Kris Oravec, who guided me through the things I would need to do for the park (talks, workshops, that kinda thang) and also lent me a moose antler to make some work around. Ten points Kris!

3. I got up feeling a bit lonely and far from home, and headed down to Galliot studios on the say so of Kris, to meet the Jennifer Galliot. Jen is a local artist, who makes beautiful tapestry and ceramics. You can check her out here at the galliott studios blog:

http://galliottstudios.blogspot.ca/.  She also makes a mean cup of tea, and did an excellent job of lifting me from my homesickness with her loveliness. Ten points also Jen!

4. I started making two sets of objects. One is a sort of Moose antler shaped net – like a butterfly net for moose antlers, and the other is a set of Arctic Hare ears. I always feel odd talking about art that is still in jelly stage, so here are two animal facts to distract you: Moose loose their antlers every year, and given the moose population, there should be a million around. But, in some very cleanly efforts, the caribou and the rodents eat them up. Yep. The next fact is that the artic hare is grey like a rock in summer and white as white in winter, with just black tips on their ears. I have been thinking about what this black bit is for, but have come up a blank so far. Maybe I’ll ask someone. Or maybe I’ll make a reason up.

Day 3 – 26^th July

Today it was raining. The mountains are amazing in the rain, all the clouds come over and fill up the bay, and it feels quite comforting and calm. This is nothing like the storms that come through here, just a quiet, grey layer over the land. I went exploring along the edge of the water, where I saw a million amazing washed and grey wooden structures and boats. I also saw these stairs, which are wonderful. I think I will go back and ask if I can make some art on them – just a little bit of art, then I will give them back.

I dropped into Jen at Galliot Studios and met the very lovely Olivia Ball. Olivia was a past artist in residence, and has come back to live here. Her work is very excellent, made from silver and found materials. As you know, great art is my favorite kind, and you can have a look at it right here: http://www.oliviaball.com/.  This seems to happen a lot, which says great things about both the community and the place, and quite frankly, there are far too many talented folks around here altogether. There must be a big art magnet around these parts. Jen asked me to catch a ferry over to Norris Point to be on the radio with them to that night. I said Great! And went home to make some more art. This is the moose antler net in progress:

When I got on the boat (I ran there. Even here, where I can do anything with my time, I am still chronically late) we bought return tickets. I said oh, good, I wondered if we would get back tonight. Jen and Olivia informed me that, no, we would camp and come back in the morning. Surprise! Luckily, Jens’ fella, will, brought all the gear over and set it up. We had a good old radio time, ate some moose pizza, and then headed out to the open mic with Mike at the pub. It was so great, we may do it again sometime, and, if you are so inclined, you can listen to us having a rant online, on the site www.vobb.org. It’s on from 6.30  - 8.00pm here, so that’s 7am – 8.30am for yez all back home, I'll keep you posted on the actual likeliness of this.

Day 4 – 27^th July

After catching the ferry home from Norris Point, and then briefly falling asleep again, I headed into the studio for the bulk of the day, and listened to radio national podcasts, which was great!

 Something I have found tricky here is trying to balance my urge to just stay inside making with the amazing opportunity to explore a whole new place. If I just wanted to make art, I should have pretended I was going away and then just hid in my studio for a month (I haven’t, it’s too cold to sleep in Mitchell).  I am here because I want to make something that reflects this place, not just my imagined view of this place from inside a studio. So, in the afternoon I drove over to Trout River and walked along the headland. There is something very calming about looking out off the edge of the land, and I find satisfying the promise that something is on the other side of the ocean, even though we can’t see it from the shore.

Returning home I met with a fantastic evening of meet and greet at the residence house. The house suddenly felt much warmer and happier with all those people in there, and it was excellent to meet all the artists, musicians, makers and locals (sometimes all at once!). It is a lovely and humbling feeling to meet so many open and welcoming people so far from your home. Aw, shucks.

Day 5 – 28^th July

Determined to go out into the wilderbeast, and not just stay in the studio as I could at home, I got up to take Kris Oravecs’ Tablelands walk. The tablelands are an amazing part of Gros Morne, which stand barren and red in an otherwise lush valley. Through some excellent, although not entirely voluntary, audience participation, Kris demonstrated the way the ocean floor had cracked and slide up and over the continent to expose some of the Earth’s Mantle. (I had no idea what this was – just in case you don’t either, it’s the hot wiggly bit beneath the Earth’s crust.)

The way that things survive in this environment blows my mind. The exposed mantle is rock, rich in minerals and without a lot of water, so the plants develop these amazing techniques to live there. One plant pumps all the toxic elements into one leaf at a time, killing that leaf and then moving on to the next one, in the hope that it can flower and seed before it runs out of leaves and dies. Other tiny little plants, big as your hand, make huge long taproots up to a metre and a half long to hold into what soil there is and get to the water.

I came back to spend the afternoon in the studio trying to get down all the things I was so excited by on the walk before they floated away. This was only briefly, but very importantly, stopped to watch Jen and Olivia win the Dory Races! Dressed as Captains!  Woody point has a million things going on, and as part of the Bonne Bay Regatta I have seen a bike parade, a torch parade, fire works, the dory races, and, this very evening, the dance at the Legions, which was great and filled with Steve Miller.  After a good potluck up at the Residence, we ducked to the heritage theatre to catch the fantastic “Sherlock Holmes: The Nazi of Bonne Bay”. This was a radio play style production, with cello, piano, songs and a really great set up of sound effects using chains and sticks and ropes and all sorts of jazz. (There was no actual Jazz, that’s a figure of speech) 

Day 6 – 29^th July

Today was filled with the joy of searching for art materials in a new place where the op shops are unfamiliar and deftly hidden. Of course, I forgot it was Sunday, so it turned out they were just closed. On my way to Corner Brook I tried to stop in at the tip, but was greeted by a closed gate and a sign saying I would be prosecuted if I entered. Personally, the sign just inside the gate that said “ Beware of Bears” was, alone enough to turn me off.

No luck with the tip, I headed over to Corner Brook in search of cables, canvas, two pairs of headphones, handles for satellite dishes and some conical metal tubes. I came home with two long cables, two pairs of headphones and two trowels, mostly from a great flea market I passed, and from the strange and wonderful Canadian Tire. They are really good trowels.

Day 7 – 30^th July.

I don’t want to pick favorites here, but I think that today might win. It just might. I got up early to drive over to Rocky Harbor, which is about 1 and a quarter hours drive, but only 15 mins ferry. This is because I am living on the arm of an inlet which comes in from the ocean and then splits in two, and we are at the ocean end. You drive from here back inland, along a bit and then back out towards the sea, but on the other side of the water. Here is where the first excellent thing happened. I saw two black foxes with white tails by the side of the road, and as I drove up to them, they looked at me and they were just amazing. Sometimes looking into an animal that lives in the wild makes you feel a shake in your centre. They have no urge to be anywhere near you, they don’t even care if you are there, except that you interrupted their meal. They live places you could never be, and they sleep outside all the time.  I know wild animals are all over the shop and everyone sees them, but this time I just felt it. When I arrived at Rocky Harbor I asked Tom the ranger what they were, and he said they were the counter-intuitively named Red Fox.

I was at Rocky Harbor to join Tom and Sean on their job of collecting the Moose tracking collars around the park. These are GPS collars, timed to fall off after two years collecting data. Charlotte, who also works in parks, would join us as we went up in the helicopter to track the signals. Yes, helicopter. It was amazing. The park here is so big and wild, it covers a huge amount of ground. If I were to hike everyday I was here I could not cover it all. Due to the different geological features, altitudes and exposures to the ocean and wind, it almost feels as though the park is made up of a million different places stitched together. 

We flew up, looked down and Sean tracked the beeping of the collars. They send out a different beep when they are fallen off than when they are moving and still on a moose. The first stop we set down and then Sean and Tom got out the awesome antenna seen here:

We walked following the signal into the alder forest, which had no path and was full of moss and bog, and just walked around in there, Sean tracking the beeping and Tom looking out for the collar. When it was found, it looked like a big vertebrae, and was lined with two years of moose hair.  It was fantastic! We just cranked through the bush, being in this amazing place where I would never have been otherwise, searching and traveling around in a helicopter. We then repeated this process 4 more times, each time in a different and strange place. We picked up a collar in the highlands, where caribou and moose with enormous antlers scatted as we set down. They are both such majestic creatures, and when they run you can see the quiver of the muscle and flesh under their skin, and you wonder how they can move with the huge weight of the antlers always at their heads. We are bakeapple and blueberries from the ground, and walked in a lagoon where some antlers were fallen off and rotting away. We pushed through trees and scrub and saw huge mushrooms.

By the end of the day Tom and Sean had found all the collars, Charlotte and I had quickly lost fear of the helicopter and I drove home to make some art for the afternoon. I made a bear armature for the bear net, and worked on the arctic hare hearing ears. I was amazed to find that not only the arctic hare, but the snowshoe hare, the ptarmigan, the mink and the caribou all change colour over the winter. And then I made a quite interesting soup from old broccoli and now I will fall asleep, exhausted and very happy.

Day 8 – July 31^st

Two great non-art related things happened today. Firstly, I spent the morning having a tune with accordion player, Charlie Payne. It was excellent to play music with Charlie, lovely to find we had a few tunes in common and it will be great to catch up again with the new tunes we swapped.

After a lovely impromptu lunch at Galliot studios, I headed home to spend the afternoon working on a bear net. It came along faster than I thought, but has a much more melancholic feeling about it than I expected.

 

The second excellent non-art event was that Ed and Kris took me out in boat (that’s how they say it here) this evening. It was stunning to putt along the edge of the water and look up at the rock and forest rising from the ocean, falling straight into the sea. We saw three bald headed eagles, two tickle aces and some terns, and pulled right up along the edge of the town. It was beautiful.  When we pulled up we met a gent also called Ed, who told a story of a gal following a moose trail and ending up lost in the park. He found her, cold and waving from the shore the following day. He also told us about finding cracks in the rock so deep that when you drop a stone down you count to thirty before it hits the bottom. It seems as though the land is so wild here, and the sea so cold, that people choose to live in the turbulent juncture of the two, along the shore, at the meeting of land and sea. And in that tiny space everyone makes this amazing town, builds these incredible communities and creates a home space that is so welcoming and warm. It is no mean feat.