Artist's Statement

and Video

Salmon are

a Wonder

 “This is the story of ….”

 This is a story which Judith Williams has been telling for a long time.

“A small winch slowly hoists a book high in the air. At the top, it releases and the book plummets to the floor. Thunk! The cycle repeats: Again and again for many hours. The continual impacts gradually damage the book – until it is destroyed.

 “Through the relentless demolition of a book, Salmon Stock mimics the destruction of a vital part of BC’s heritage: Salmon.”

 (from Judith Williams. Salmon Stock, Richmond Art Gallery, 2003)

The artist insists she was not always so socially or historically engaged. The engagement “came really from the landscape itself,” she recalls. “It did not START from theory.”  As an emerging artist, and a woman artist in 1960s and 70s Vancouver, and subsequently as an Assistant Professor of Arts at the University of British Columbia, she stood in the line of fire from heavily political art criticism, history and praxis.  She collaborated on a 1972 project trendily titled History’s Wife

Judith Williams. Desolation Sound looking south Oct 2008

Judith Williams. Mouth of Roscoe Bay Creek, Oct 2008

So began the artist’s historical questioning. The logbook of Captain George Vancouver provided the beginning of an answer. He and his crew found “not a single prospect that was pleasing to the eye, the smallest recreation on shore, nor animal nor vegetable food… nor did our exploring parties meet with a more abundant supply, whence the place obtained the name of desolation sound”.  To complete their frustration, “not a fish at the bottom could be tempted to take the hook”.  Why did Vancouver’s perception differ so radically from hers two hundred years later?

Surrey Art Gallery

In this piece, which she bound into the book-work A Voyage Round, Williams invoked the voices of the British Captain Vancouver through his account A Voyage of Discovery…, of the  Spanish explorers through a translation A Spanish Voyage Round the World,  of botanist Archibald Menzies through a typescript of his manuscript log, and of herself as artist and participant, all interacting with the landscape and the First Nations people.

“Each seated person could not see the other book although I once saw 22 children all piled on it looking every which way. It was shown in Surrey in 1990, and at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where we placed it at the opposite end of a long stretch opposite the Bill Reid bear that was the only other thing you could touch in the place. It was much used and abused.”

But such “use and abuse” demonstrates active engagement with the art. In contrast she wryly laments works which disappeared into prestigious collections never again to see the light of day.

Another Log from 1990, Rock Burn, which she says is “very close to my deep self”, recapitulates her encounter with pictograph images from Salish and Kwakiutl territory, the juxtaposition of camera and Native pigments, ways of seeing, varying lights, growth of lichen and loss of negatives, and the careful records of other inquirers. The featured pictograph depicts a European ship. The coloured rock looks burnt. Paper of similar shade enhances the book work. Her spare text, superimposed on the images, questions, evokes and invites.

The rock did burn… I’m sure of it. (The whole world is secretly on fire) I saw the ships (If you want, you can burn… if you want…)

 She explored the conjunctions and contradictions between the seen and the heard, transparency and opacity, using camera, printed page, photocopier and various papers, examining the ephemeral character of images and memories. “The logs are very crucial elements in my thinking - it really was how I resolved into the work I have done since and how I integrated my visual art and research.”

 At this point, and often subsequently, she was asking the story, rather than telling it. She called the 1990 Surrey exhibition Whose Story is This?  Asking the question publicly added to its complexity. Multiple truths, perceptions, and voices challenged any “definitive” interpretation of history.    

image scanned from Williams’ Log Books.

Above: Judith Williams photo, Seiner seining coho broodstock on behalf of the Desolation Sound Salmon Enhancement Society, Doctor Bay.

Below: the artist at work.

Whose story? One of the artist’s answers had to be “Mine.” Since 1989, Williams has taken yearly research trips aboard the aluminum speedboat Tetacus and the 62-foot wooden seiner Adriatic Sea. She chairs the Desolation Sound salmon Enhancement Society, which over a period of ten years has reintroduced Coho and Chum salmon into Refuge Lagoon on West Redonda Island, and renewed habitat at Roscoe Bay on the east side of West Redonda and at Unwin Creek on the mainland.

Click to open Judith Williams' Desolation Sound Salmon Enhancement Society Research Report

“All that led very swiftly to native people and to narratives about native/white engagement. I discovered big chunks of history that were at that time unpublished and as I researched and then created the work that became High Slack I was politicized.”

  High Slack, an installation of paintings, objects and books about a forgotten military campaign in colonial British Columbia, the Tsilhqot’in War of 1864,was  shown at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in 1994 and precipitated a symposium with multisided participation. Writing in the Literary Review of Canada, Chris Arnett called High Slack a “remarkable event that brought the past into the present, a reminder to the dominant cultural group of its collective ignorance, slow to erode, regarding the interaction of industrial western society and the inhabitants of ancient landscapes.”

 (from  http://greatanotherone.googlepages.com/LRCArnettJan-Feb2007.pdf)

The installation included two book works, each book on a table in the middle of the exhibition, inviting the viewer to sit down and read on the spot. From there High Slack evolved into a third incarnation in 1996, as a more conventional-style book in New Star Publisher’s Transmontanus Series, edited by Terry Glavin. As storyteller and often as a character in her own stories, Williams reaches a wide audience of history buffs, environmentalists, and “general readers”.  She has written two more books in the Transmontanus series: Dynamite Stories (2003) and Clam Gardens (2006). In Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time (2001), also published by New Star, she documented the cliff pictographs of First Nations artist Marianne Nicolson, in a setting of rich history and present encounters.

(from http://www.newstarbooks.com/)

Yet at the same time she was demonstrating her facility with words and the making of books, while Clam Gardens was honoured by the BC Book Prizes and the BC Historical Society Book Awards, she was conceiving a work which seems to question the efficacy of words and books.

Still pursuing the question, “Whose Story is this?”. Williams recognized that the fish who eluded Captain Vancouver’s hook, demand a hearing, and she grants it to them in the series Salmon Stock. Her answer in this first section,  begun in 2001, remains an incomplete sentence: “This is the story of …” 

 Williams writes about the 3-part work in the accompanying statement and in the appendix “Salmon are a Wonder.”  It is up to us as viewers, voyeurs, participants, to approach the work as art, to read the medium as political and historical message, to relate the aesthetic to the ecological, to fill in the blanks.

“This is the story of…” in a video of less than 20 minutes condenses a cycle repeated through many hours – the destruction of a printed book – further condensing a process which has taken many years – the destruction of the salmon stocks. “The duration.” Williams explains, “is part of the work. That is, it took a long slow time, then a speeded up time, to decimate salmon stocks.”

(To see the video and read the artist's statement CLICK HERE.)

Most of us, including Williams, are offended by the deliberate destruction of a book. The offence, the shock, like the duration, is part of the work. Documents, surveys, scientific studies, government reports, even substantial volumes such as the one at the end of this winch, have  failed, and one of them is sacrificed as a sign for the need to save the salmon and  their related ecosystem.

 The juxtaposition of venues is shocking too – a contemporary art gallery and a once-operating cannery, the cannery innocent of trendy redecorating – living arts and industrial history in a medium sized coastal city.

 How will the various readings from those audiences relate to the radical new venue of the Internet?

 The image fills the screen – or shrinks to a portion of the visible field, giving the viewer space to comment or meditate or get on with other things while continually aware of the progress to destruction.

Amazingly, the video has a mesmerizing beauty. The book spins on the winch, the pages fan, words suddenly come close to us, face to face, then retreat, to a stark minimalist rhythm, a post-industrial Dance to the Music of Time.

 Story time.

 This is the story of…

Once upon a time.

Promise time. A traditional phrase pledges a commitment to last “as long as the sun shines and the river runs.” But what if the sun shines too much, and the river no longer runs?

“I wanted you to ask why these enormously clever fish, with

an elaborate system they ran efficiently on their own, were

being allowed to dwindle and be replaced by sickly fish we

have to pay people to tend, feed and medicate.”

[Judith Williams, “Salmon are a Wonder”, 2003]

            Wait a minute (a small bit of time). Whose story IS this? Maybe the Salmon R Us?

Judith Williams. Coho broodstock, Doctor bay, Waddington Channel, Oct 2008

 Are we out of time? Can we redeem the time?

 An Invitation (if there is Time).

In its “real world” venues, the showing of “This is the story of…”  has been followed by round-table discussions. The Internet is a catalyst for exchange of thoughts and ideas. We look forward to your comments, ideas, questions.

It’s your story too.

 ...To be continued…

Post your comments and let’s have a dialogue here….