prairie long poems

sticks/stones The fourth piece in this series...the left panel is an image of the standing stones at Stenness, not far from Stromness in the Orkneys, while the right panel is an image of 'dolphins' in the Fraser River North Arm near the river's mouth. The dolphins are the pilings that log booms are moored to as they are brought into the river, prior to being hauled upstream to lumber mills. They also help as navigational guides for boats heading up or down the river, as the landscape here is very flat and in a fog the river banks can be hard to see. The central image was taken from the window of the hotel I was staying in at Stromness, looking out over the harbour. Stromness was the last port that many ships called into before heading for North America, including all the Hudson's Bay Company ships. They collected water and food here, and often picked up a few crew members as well, as Orcadians were known as hardy sailors, well-suited to the North Atlantic. Those who stayed in Rupert's Land (the HBC holdings in North America) were likewise well-suited to the harsh life of the barrenlands and boreal forest of the fur-trade environment. In the hotel itself, the public bar is called the Hudson Room, and has a large map of Canada on the wall showing all the Hudson's Bay posts. The large standing stone circle at Stenness is about an hour's fast walk from Stromness, and dates to the neolithic age about 5,000 years ago.

prairie long poems

information/visitors The third piece in this series (click on the image for a better one!)... The two outside panels are images of benches and tables outside a laundry near my studio; one of the signs says 'Information' and the other says 'Visitors Must Report to the Office'. I sat at both tables and did not receive or dispense any information, nor did I report at the office...the central panel is an image of a bench on a cliff on South Ronaldsey, one of the Orkney Islands. The bench overlooks the North Sea, and at the time there was a freighter moving southwards a long way off. We did not exchange any information, nor did I or the freighter report at any office that time either, although it seemed that we were both visiting.

prairie long poems

back to the river ...second in the Prairie Long Poems. The river in this piece is the River Boyne in Ireland, not far from the site of the famous battle, and also not far from Newgrange, one of the most spectacular of the many Neolithic burial mounds scattered throughout this part of Europe. The central panel is based on a photo of Tracy Jager looking out my studio window (and smoking) on her first visit, as The Archaeology of Water project was getting under way.

prairie long poems

Pict Bridge This is the first piece in a series I've been working on (that should be on and off!) for about 2 years. Each of the pieces consists of three panels that are developed independently, then glued together. The two outside panels are 3/4" birch plywood, while the central panel is thin steel which has been bonded to plywood. The over all dimensions are 12" x 48".
In this particular piece, the right panel is a view of the River Liffey in Dublin, while the left panel is crop shelters on fields in Perthshire, Scotland. The photos were taken on the same day, the Dublin one in the morning, and the Scottish one later in the afternoon on the way to Aberdeen. The central panel is a layered image composed of scanned images of a very small porcelain figure found on a beach in Scotland, combined with lace from a curtain of a friend's house.It wasn't until I was looking at the photos from Ireland and Scotland that I noticed the similar arched forms of the bridge and crop shelters...in any case, I'd been looking for a way to bring some images together. All the work is screenprinted, but with significant additions of drawing on the plywood panels, and etching in acid with the steel central panel. The outside panels have probably 30 layers of ink, varnish and drawing, while the central panel is about six layers of ink with etching between layers. (Please click on the image...)

in the beginning...

This blog was suggested by my friend Tracy Jager, who is working on a project with me entitled The Archaeology of Water, a handprinted suite of etchings based on poems submitted by five writers from the Canadian prairies. The first print in the suite, incorporating the poem The Life and Surprizing Adventures by Robert Kroetsch, seemed to require an image of a coconut monkey, which/who was duly found by Tracy in a local Filipino grocery store (whoops! see comment below) and nicknamed Bob. Bob continues to reside in the studio now named after him, Coconut Monkey Press.

More images of the project will be posted over the next few days, so please check us out once in a while!

The second print in The Archaeology of Water suite. The poem, Fish, was contributed to the project by George Amabile.

The five poets whose work forms the literary core of the project are associated with the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. The project was initiated and coordinated by Winnipeg writer Karen Clavelle, who teaches in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at St. Paul's College, U of M.

The imagery for the prints was developed through a collaboration between myself and Vancouver artist/writer Tracy Jager. In fact, most of the concepts and materials for the imagery came from Tracy, while I worked out the technical elements necessary to get the imagery embedded into the plates, and eventually printed.

The third print contains the poem Riverhurst 3 by Birk Sproxton, whose untimely death in March 2007 was a great loss to the Canadian writing community, and to our project. Birk taught creative writing at Red Deer College for over thirty years while writing and publishing numerous books of poetry and prose.

The plates used for these prints are industrial grade copper, approximately 18 x 13 inches. The text for the poems was screenprinted onto the plates using sugar lift ground, and the plates were deeply bitten in ferric chloride to ensure that whatever else happened with the plates, the text elements would be well established! The imagery beyond that was mostly a combination of soft ground elements bitten directly into the plates, and photo-based elements which were screenprinted with sugar lift, then aquatinted with rosin. Once the plates were ready for editionning, they were steel faced at New Leaf Press on Granville Island, Vancouver.