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Kayak
Tent or Bivvy Sack
Sled
Backpack
Camera
Hipwaders
Raincape
Coleman lantern
Charts
Postcards A checklist:
paraphernalia for an archetypal Canadian vacation?
Or A checklist: materials for
a Donald Lawrence work of art? Works with titles like
The Beach
Portable Landscapes
Outdoor Bound
The Sled and the Storm Kit
Vehicles of Exploration
Kayaks and Caissons
The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project
Ice Follies (One-Eye Folly)
Fiddle Reef Remembered and
The Portable Lighthouse
Both
Subject =object, ingredients=product, work=play.
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above:
Polaroid Pinhole Camera, 1998, from The Underwater
Pinhole Photography Project
right: "Survival Kit" from
Romantic Commodities and the Underwater |
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Flotsam and jetsam, scavengings of yard sales, thrift shops,
albums, attics, archaeological digs, and odd bits of hardware. The
ingredients of Lawrence’s art do not disappear into the object.
“Collectively these assembled items are somewhere between a very
careful representation of the site and the random abandon of a flea
market.” Those are his own words. Others have agreed, describing his
work as “obsessive mastery and utter dysfunction” and “absurd
technology and luminous images.”* |
Donald Lawrence with “Fiddle Reef Remembered,”
sculpture, during construction, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria,
2006 |
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Donald Lawrence salvaging raft (abandoned dock), Paul
Lake, Kamloops, 2008 |
As in any Canadian wilderness
excursion, the journey away from home and into the wilderness is
part of the adventure. Every time I have met Lawrence he has had at
least one kayak strapped to the roof of his vehicle. True, I have
met him only on this island where he has a cabin and future studio,
so in a rural, semi-wilderness context. But the kayak travels atop
both the battered pickup and the urban compact. Lawrence’s search
for the “Exotic Close to Home” takes him through the city en route
to the beach. (Compare the video of
Terrance Houle
and Trevor Freeman portaging a canoe through downtown Vancouver.) |
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I see the kayak as analogous to the brushes, boards, and tubes of
acrylic which typically accompany artists. One never knows when one
might require a kayak – perhaps, for instance, to tow a portable
lighthouse. Wherever he is - tidal waters of British Columbia, the
Thompson Rivers, the Alberta “Good Lands,” Lake Nipissing, the
Newfoundland coast - Lawrence carries with him the subject and the
object of his art, the commodities associated with our landscape.
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Fiddle Reef Remembered. Who is doing
the remembering? The Lighthouse at Fiddle Reef was already
automated, the people who had manned it had gone and taken their
memories with them by the time the young Lawrence became aware of
it. (See Donald Graham, Keepers of the Light, 1985.) When he returned
to Victoria as an adult, the lighthouse too had disappeared,
replaced by the present inhospitable cylinder. His reconstruction of
Fiddle Reef lighthouse began in 2006 with a project for the Art
Gallery of Greater Victoria. How that project took on a life of its
own, with a past as a sculpture, a model based on an ironing board –
and a future as – what? – a lighthouse kit, a portable lighthouse, a
reconstituted lighthouse placed in its original location –
remembering and referencing the found and invented materials of life
on the coast – is the topic of this exhibition, and a story to
unfolded by the artist.
left: “Fiddle Reef
Remembered,” sculpture (detail)
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2006 |
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Fiddle Reef Remembered bears some relationship to
other follies and eccentric personal museums which Lawrence
affectionately tracks down and describes.** But his project is more
than a personal creation. The lighthouse, manned, unmanned,
deconstructed or reconstructed, is a public site – and one that will
never again be the same or ever again be imagined in the same way.
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“Fiddle Reef Remembered,” first drawing for project,
2006 |
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"'Lighthouse Kit,' with Hammer folding kayak and
Necky 'Rip'" watercolour drawing, 2006
On Gabriola Island, where I live and Lawrence sometimes lives,
local historians tell of a floating lighthouse, identified as the
light at Entrance Island, wonderfully appearing to witnesses on the
Sunshine Coast, across the Salish Sea. {Flying
Shingle, Oct 31, 2008 } But at the time, the mid 1950s, no
one seems to have reported this to the press; no one took pictures.
The floating lighthouse remains in a few memories. A mirage? The
light at Entrance Island is solid enough, though about to be
unmanned. How long before nothing remains but bleak uninhabited
automated towers? and memories? and one day a lighthouse effigy,
still in its kit of recyclables, towed behind a kayak paddled by an
artist who will reassemble it in its natural habitat?
Phyllis Reeve
2010 |
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right: “Fiddle Reef Journal,” topographical drawing,
view to east, 2006
below: "Fiddle Reef,"video, 2007 |
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Notes:
*Susan Gibson Garvey, Katy McCormick in Donald Lawrence: the
Underwater Pinhole Photography Project, 2002]
**“Dwelling, Display and Vernacular Practice in the Personal Museum:
Study and Play in Elsinga’s Planetarium, Hille van Dieren’s Wrakken
Museum,and Sir John Soane’s Museum”, The International Journal of
the Inclusive Museum V.1, 2008
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