“There wasn’t much napping,” says Kym Greeley, as she makes us espressos as we begin our interview. She has just returned from driving across Canada, from Vancouver to St. John’s, via the Trans-Canada Highway. Greeley shared the mileage with her sister, Joann.

When her sister was driving, Greeley took photographs using a dashboard-mounted tripod, which was constructed to capture the driver’s perspective through the windshield. Then, when it was Greeley’s turn to drive, she asked her sister to press the shutter upon her request.“You were kind of forced to always pay attention to what you were looking at and what you were seeing, which was really fun,” says Greeley.

This attention is central to Greeley’s work. She is a landscape painter who observes the ways we interact with nature every day, and reflects this complexity back to the viewer. At the centre of her work is a relationship to Newfoundland and Labrador, which is continuously evolving.

Physical and visual access to the landscape changed significantly in 1966 when the Newfoundland portion of the Trans-Canada highway was completed, spanning 900 kilometres between St. John’s and Channel-Port aux Basques. Previously, the most accessible way to travel was by boat, but road access created an entirely new set of sightlines and approaches to some remote communities, carved through the wilderness.

While representations of this place can linger in a bucolic aesthetic calibrated for sale in souvenir shops—picturesque harbours, windswept cliffs and impossibly bright jellybean houses—Greeley’s paintings offer another view.

Greeley uses the car windshield as a frame, and the highway as a major compositional element in her paintings. Objects often cropped out of tourism brochures, such as road signs, guardrails and lane markings, become significant features. The aesthetic of the highway is reflected in her refined style. Like the graphics used on highway signs, each element is clear and readable. Layered together, however; they create intricate compositions and complex, open-ended narratives

Common Occurrences, Greeley’s most recent exhibition at Christina Parker Gallery, was created during a long winter. In Be Real, a reflective speed bump sign is illuminated against dark woods. There is a sharp curve in the road and snow on the shoulders. While you are reminded of the fragility of human bodies, and the destructive power of speeding cars, the hazards here seem to extend further than road safety.

Sometimes her colours are an exercise in subtlety, where a flat expanse of water meets a pale expanse of sky. Drama happens in bright white snow drifting across dark rock, or ice piled up along the shoreline. Sometimes I Feel Too Much is a stomach-fluttering vista where the ground seems to drop straight down to the North Atlantic just below the bottom of the frame. It’s the kind of image that only seems possible in winter. There is the ever-present danger of slipping, but also the delicious solitude of travel after tourist season.

Common Occurrences also focuses on another site of human intersection with the landscape – the lookout point. It Doesn’t Mean Anything at All features a rectangular sign, in silhouette at the centre of the frame, in front of a vast bay, punctuated by a pale strip of land at the horizon. There is no text visible, yet its presence indicates some interpretation, or mediation of this landscape was deemed necessary.

Greeley describes lookouts as places “that the community has designated as their optimum viewpoints.” Located conveniently off the highway, these locations present an idealized, camera-ready view of the landscape that never includes the road itself. “Most people when they get to these lookouts, don’t even exit their vehicle,” says Greeley. “They just feel satisfied by taking a picture out the windshield or out the side, and then Instagramming it or Facebooking it, to prove that they’ve visited that place. It is enough interaction for them.”

But lookouts also serve a practical purpose for those living and working in rural areas.

“The lookouts are the highest points, so those places are where you have cell service and so a lot of people travel to the spaces from their cabins, or just stop to check their phone,” says Greeley.

“We’re guilty of it, too. We go up the big hill to watch the sunset and check our emails, take a few snaps and drive back down to put the kids to bed.”

This visual mediation between human and landscape provides another framework for Greeley.

“I’m kind of interested in the technological connection through another object. The fixed compositional frame mimicking the compositional frame of your phone or your iPad, and what you’re looking at through that.”

Greeley’s frames take in more than most. They foreground interpretive panels, retain walls, view platforms and handrails. Her work illustrates more markers of human presence and human perspective on the landscape. It is these markers that remind us of our own subject position within the places we inhabit.

Greeley describes herself as “somebody whose most comfortable language is image.” She has developed a distinct vocabulary of form, texture and colour that she employs with precision, like an iconography for this place. But hers is also a poetic sensibility—using formal structure and exacting detail to explode layers of connection and meaning.

Carrie Allison’s work deals with identity, as well as ideas of allyship, kinship, and hosting. An artist of Cree, Metis, and European descent who embraced her Indigeneity at a later age, her approach to materials is empathetic and thoughtful, working in large and often collaborative beading projects. Her work traces lines—fingers over pages, veins across skin, rivers across landscapes, while looking to the future of cultural institutions and the laws that govern them.

As part of her MFA thesis work, Allison considered waterways that were important to her maternal lineage, and beaded the Heart and Fraser Rivers (in Alberta and B.C., respectively). Wanting to make a similar gesture to the place she has called home for the past seven years, Allison turned her attention to the Shubenacadie River. She invited collaborators of all skill levels to bead a portion of the River in an attempt to build community and draw attention to the work of Indigenous water protectors who are on the front lines fighting the Alton Gas development—underground gas storage units that Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies are opposing, due to the development’s plan to dump salt brine into the Shubenacadie River.

MOLLIE CRONIN interviews CARRIE ALLISON in anticipation of her latest body of research and work with Eyelevel Gallery the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax, NS.

MOLLIE: I remember talking with Eyelevel director Julia McMillan back in the spring and when she told me about your work, she kept using the word “transplant,” relating to how you were thinking about plants (invasive species in particular) and sort of seeing yourself reflected in that idea.

CARRIE: I love plants, I think they’re amazing … Identity has always been in my practice, but it’s always been a hard thing for me to understand. When you’re trying to reclaim a connection to Indigeneity … it was hard for me to do, I didn’t grow up in an Indigenous community—my grandmother wouldn’t acknowledge that she was Indigenous and that was mostly because of residential school guilt, so I feel like that was passed down to me. It took me a really long time to be okay with saying: “I’m an Indigenous person, as well as mixed-race” (which is something that I identify more with). Plants were the first way I understood that. It made more sense to think about colonialism though plants, how the landscape has been altered, and that moved [my work] to more political and social practice in general.

I looked at a lot of indigenous plants and invasive species, which I’m still very fascinated by because they’re so pervasive. With projects like this I really just see myself as trying to navigate [these ideas] but also build connections, kin and work within this idea of allyship. I understand that I am a guest here, that I am being hosted by the Mi’kmaq people.

MOLLIE: I think there’s a lot of material there, in terms of thinking about colonialism through plants: landscape, agriculture, even gardening and growing grass…

CARRIE: Grass is so crazy! It’s like a sign of royalty—the fact that we still have it in our lives is very weird!

MOLLIE: Our “natural” spaces in Halifax are so Victorian still—from the park to the public gardens, it’s very British.

CARRIE: Very British. You can’t sit on the grass.

MOLLIE: I think that your work with museums right now is a similar sort of teasing out a very rigid way of moving through a space. Museums operate with these same restraints—very precious, very white glove, very don’t sit on the grass.

CARRIE: Totally. A lot of Indigenous knowledge is based within the land, but colonial knowledge is based in these boxes. These “discoveries.” Whereas a landscape can function as an archive in and of itself.

MOLLIE: A living archive.

CARRIE: Yeah, it’s just a matter of knowing how to read it. [Archives and museums] are gatekeepers. I’m fascinated by them—museums and libraries—I’ve always loved searching for things. They can hold so much power. Libraries, archives, churches—they just hold everything there. And [these are the spaces] where we were “legitimized” as people: marriage, birth, etc. I always have a hard time navigating these two worlds. I grew up in a world of museums and libraries; everyone grows up in institutions in some way, these colonial parameters that you have to navigate as a citizen. Indigenous ways of being don’t really function within those constraints. They’re more fluid—a more fluid way of being. 

Meagan Musseau, [re]claim: ELMASTUKWEK, (Mi’kmaq place name for Bay of Islands, NL), appliqué beadwork on commercial tanned/dyed rabbit fur, January 2018, 30.5 cm x 43.2 cm.

“Landscape is pedagogy,” says Meagan Musseau, almost in passing, near the end of our telephone conversation last week. I’m in St. John’s, and she is in the community of Curling in the Bay of Islands, Newfoundland and Labrador—Elamstukwek, Ktaqmkuk territory of Mi’kma’ki. We’d discussed her practice in relation to the legality and politics around resource extraction and the harvesting of the natural world, community-based art practices, customary and craft-based practice as they relate to contemporary art, and the importance of mentorship in the development of the critical and singular vision of an emerging artist. Musseau goes to the heart of questions I’ve had myself around the ideas of artistic research and the blurring of the line between art and life. Her research is based partly in what seems to be the simple act of walking through the landscape around her home, and being receptive and responsive to what’s revealed to her. “Resource extraction of a different type,” she says.

Meagan Musseau, Intergalactic L’nu Basket, split vinyl and neon orange flagging tape, January 2018, 17.8 cm x 17.8 cm x 45.7 cm.

Of Mi’kmaq and French ancestry, and originally trained as a painter at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook, Musseau has developed an inter-disciplinary practice which includes new media, beadwork, basketry, land-based action and installation to explore memory, language and the relationship between land and body, object and narrative.

“Video and installation became the means by which I could disseminate my more performative work,” she explains, and I immediately think of her installation Made In Ktaqmkuk in which Musseau narrates footage of herself walking on the land—the narration consisting of oral knowledge and stories passed down to her by her grandmother and other family members. That the act of walking through landscape is a political act of reclamation holds special resonance for anyone who’s ever questioned ideas around ownership, property, home and identity.

“My response to the landscape is emotional … I observe and engage with the land and the social environment in which I live.” —Meagan Musseau

“It’s the painter in me that drew me to those colours,” she says, when I ask about Intergalactic L’nu Baskets—a series of traditional Mi’kmaq baskets wherein the customary materials of ash wood, spruce roots and sweetgrass are replaced with brightly coloured neon flagging tape “which is actually a petroleum product” she tells me. This synthesis of customary and craft practice with modern (and potentially toxic) industrial material embraces the tension between a welcome and a warning, old and ultra-new, the fleeting cultural memory and customs versus the near indestructible qualities of the tape. The effect is uncanny—the near mundane utility of the baskets transformed into beguiling objects that repulse and attract simultaneously. “I explore the formal qualities of basketry and seek to learn the language of weaving which is rooted in our ancestral territory, Mi’kma’ki,” she explains.

 

Meagan Musseau, Likpeniken (basket). Split vinyl and neon orange flagging tape, 12.7 cm x 12.7 cm x 22.9 cm, January 2018. Image courtesy of the artist

Meagan Musseau, “[re]claim: SIPUK,” (Sydney, NS), appliqué beadwork on commercial tanned/dyed rabbit fur

It all comes back to the land. “My response to the landscape is emotional,” she says. “I observe and engage with the land and the social environment in which I live.” Her installation when they poison the bogs we will still braid sweetgrass resulted from a land- based endurance performance of Musseau’s on Sacred Buffalo

Guardian Mountain in Banff, Alberta. Wearing her grandmother’s sealskin boots, Musseau braids a long length of bright orange flagging tape, which is tied to a nearby tree. The craft practice of braiding with this material is pregnant with meaning. Braiding—an act meant to beautify while strengthening a single line of fabric— is tied (pardon the pun) into the idea of familial and cultural knowledge. A practice passed from one generation to the next. What then does Musseau’s action suggest about the fate of this cultural knowledge? The orange flagging tape demarcating not only the physical landscape—here and there, ours and theirs—but as a visual representation of the passage of time itself. But as the title of the work proclaims, this cultural knowledge will not be lost, even when, finally, they’ve poisoned the entire world.

Before I hang up, Meagan stops me. “I just gotta say,” she says. “I want to talk about mentorship and community. How Jordan Bennett and Ursula Johnson gave me so much support. How important that was for me.” I say something like, “I think all art practice is community practice in a way,” and immediately know that’s a dumb thing to say but Musseau is too generous to correct me.

“And now it’s my turn to give back to the next generation of artists,” she says. It’s an important point, one that too frequently never gets made. Given the nature of Musseau’s work, one can see how acknowledging the community from which she’s gotten so much is vital to her practice itself.

Performance of Samuel Thulin’s “Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands.” Photo: Nigel Quinn

For me, sound and landscape go hand in hand. We travel through life being highly influenced by the sounds in our environment. Although hearing is not at the highest point of the sensual hierarchy, the sensuous space of sound is a powerful knowledge position to work from. Sound is used in medicine to determine the well being of our bodies and is used in geology to connect and predict the makeup and movement of the earth. It resonates through all matter, the rock, the path, the tree and the land, and it is perceived through our ears, our skin and our bones.

This intimate relationship between the land, human, song and sound plays an important role in the theme of the artist residency and event created by curator Caroline Loncol Daigneault, in collaboration with the Magdalen Island’s Artist Run Centre AdMare. The theme Songlines draws directly upon the Australian Aboriginal ways of knowing that include Dreamtime and Songlines as it recalls the essence of the 1987 book written by Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines.

From this point of knowing, it is easy to enter the sound work of New Brunswick born Samuel Thulin, Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands. Dr. Thulin is an academically based sound artist whose process includes what he describes as “situated composition.” This method is not only about utilizing and challenging new technologies’ capacity to create mobile sound studios or compositional situations beyond professional boundaries, it is also about dissolving the walls of the theoretical and established sound studio. Thulin is working to bring attention to the ways in which sonic and social space are composed and composing forces. Situated composition brings together and acknowledges the impacts that social, material, virtual and digital elements have as co-composers of new sounds and of each other.

Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands looked to local meteorological and geological components for inspiration. The Dunes, the sand, the wind, the sea and erosion combined with with the method of granular synthesis played key roles in the composition of his artwork. He created the work in-situ over two and a half weeks of residency. Thulin presented the final piece to the public in a participatory performance, a collective walk through a forest and meadow landscape with transistor radios and no lack of mosquitos.

Performance of Samuel Thulin’s “Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands.” Photo: Nigel Quinn

I participated in a performance including about 10 people plus the artist.  Thulin lead the performance by introducing the participants to the concept of the sound, the method of granular synthesis and the use of sounds from the sea and the coast rather than sounds of the forest or other inland elements. He also outlined the guidelines for participating in the performance: we were to walk, listening collectively to the sound as it was affected by the physical realities of walking in a group through a forest path. He intended for us to encounter erosion and interference as we experienced being near or distanced from the source of the transmission.

With transistor radios in hand, eager participants followed Samuel into the woods as he began the transmission. The experience was just as Thulin explained it would be — the sound became clear as I got closer to the source of the transmission, and the sound became deteriorated with interference from other broadcasts as I trailed behind the main group. The element I wasn’t expecting to have such an impact on my experience during the performance was the ever present white noise. It echoed from the radios that were out of transmission range. The white noise resonated with me as the voice of the wind, even though it wasn’t necessarily the recorded voice of the wind. The majority of my trip to the Magdalen Islands was engulfed by the region’s unforgiving winds. And I recall mentioning to my partner on multiple occasions that the wind was like an unrelenting white noise, definitely a characteristic of my Magdalen Island soundscape. Hard on the head but still a somewhat soothing and consistent characteristic of the Islands.

Thulin’s project Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands was one of my favourite pieces during my Songlines experience. It connected to the theme of the project in a poetic and material way. The final presentation was approached as an extension of the artist’s research, as the performance the “soundwalk” is to be considered part of the creation of the work. And although I don’t feel that didactic explanation of the inner workings of an art project always contributes to the strength of a project, in this instance it was helpful to set the stage for the players and enhanced the focus of my listening through the process of performing.

For me, Thulin’s piece created a dynamic intersection between the material and social realities of the island. Not only are the Magdalen Islands at the mercy of the sea socially, as an isolated Island community, the material composition of the Islands is primarily of sandstone, the kind of land that is far too easily eroded by the unrelenting ocean waves. The coastline of the Magdalen Islands is unstable, constantly shifting, being reshaped and dissolved into new formations. All it takes is one good storm surge and whole sections of coastline can disappear overnight. Or in the case of Thulin’s project, a slight change in the frequency and his composition is lost to the white noise of the wind.

Related: Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard find everyday wonder on the Magdalen Islands

Related: Christopher Boyne blurs lines between ‘artist’ and ‘non artist’ actors

James Geurts, Drawing Tidal Continuum #10, installation for Place Markers. Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax 2012.

James Geurts isn’t your typical landscape artist. Living, creating and surfing in Melbourne, Australia, it’s no wonder he’s developed an affinity for the great outdoors. Though for Geurts, it’s not just about capturing a particular natural phenomenon, but rather engaging with the landscape and letting his perception of the experience, along with his internal compass, lead the work where it needs to go. Making landscape art since the early ‘90s Geurts has beaten a path all over the world, exploring the equator, horizons, tidal zones and other conceptual lines using drawing, photography, video and light installation.

An attraction to the baffling Bay of Fundy was a natural one, coming to fruition this past summer when Geurts spent six weeks in Nova Scotia, working on three pieces for Dalhousie Art Gallery’s Place Markers: Mapping Locations and Probing Boundaries and digging through old scuba diving footage as an artist in residence at Halifax’s Centre for Art Tapes. Geurts and I talked at length about his fascination with landscape, the methods behind his work and past and future projects.

ALLISON SAUNDERS: Do you think your interest in conceptual lines came from being a surfer?

JAMES GEURTS: I relate being a surfer to being in landscape. Traditionally land art is based in the landscape—there is no historic art reference that talks about oceanic practice, so I refer to my experience in the ocean as part of the landscape, in a land art context.

My first conceptual drawing work was when I decided to follow the edge of Australia’s continental parameter and experiment with developing a vocabulary with the sort of sensitivity that evolves out of moving with the tides. I was interested in how you change the rhythm of your day depending on the tides and the weather conditions. I was interested in the fact that you’re on an island and this constantly pulsating edge creates another sense of temporality, as it appears and disappears, exposing the instability of something that we may perceive as being finite.

We relate to a lot of things on a human time scale, so I was interested in looking at other time scales in geography that might extend that view, and in putting myself in places to listen and experiment onsite with installation or photography, video or drawing practices. I was exploring media that would then reference what I was experiencing. The methodologies were developed directly on site with distinct features of the space—phenomena—and things that caught my attention, and then I’d work directly from that.

AS: And so, how did you apply these methodologies to your work inspired by the Bay of Fundy for Dalhousie’s ‘Place Markers’ exhibition?

JG: I wanted to work with the Bay of Fundy because it has a unique tidal resonance where both the actual amount of water that moves in and out of the Bay, and the time that it takes for each of the phases, are equal. This harmonic resonance is a rare planetary occurrence, a very particular phenomenon.

I wanted to spend time with these qualities and explore the ways that they come together to create a unique sense of flux. I didn’t actually know how the light installation was going to form fully in the gallery, and Peter [Dykhuis], who invited me to make a new work three or four weeks before the opening, was very open to its evolving form.

The light installation that I ended up making, Drawing Tidal Continuum #10, was based on a means of measuring the phenomena of these tidal movements and forces in nature. It explored the ways in which we try to fathom such movement in landscape. I devised an abstract drawing—a form of sculptural drawing in fact—using fluorescent lights. The slowly pulsing light waves—barely visible to the eye, spaced vertically at varying intervals—along with yellow electrical wires that formed a topographical map on the floor, combined to signal this sense of tidal resonance. I wanted to accentuate the perception of the electrical current of pulsing light and to draw out the relationship between its closed circuit system and the tidal circuit of water on the Earth, which is itself a finite continuum, one total water body.

I’m not always sure of what’s going to come, but it’s a process that I’ve learned to trust over the years. I travel to a place equipped with some background research, some ideas and then I devote a lot of time at the site to simply listening to what is there, rather than imposing too many preconceived ideas.

AS: You use the term “expanded drawing practice” to explain your work. Could you explain that further?

JG: I see everything that I do as part of a drawing methodology—it really feels like one and the same intentionality. The primary way that I engage with landscape is through pencil on paper. That’s an important part of the way that I build an abstract vocabulary of sensing, directly through the relationship between gesture and mark, or form, in drawing. Sometimes I spend hours or days drawing, as a way of listening. Sometimes that’s the work in itself, and that’s enough.

Other times, I’ll extend that process to photography or video, or a land art, sound or conceptual work. Even then, the way that I explore and apply these practices—when I intervene in video or photographic camera circuitry for instance—continues to focus on gesture, density, pressure, line and other features associated with the use of pencil on paper.

AS: A lot of your work begins pencil and paper then?

JG: Absolutely. Always.

AS: You’ve included two drawings in Place Markers, Drawing In and Drawing Out. What exactly were you trying to capture when you made those works?

JG: Whilst I was at the Bay of Fundy, forming the light installation work, I sat up on the point near Spencer’s Island. It felt like a lunar landscape, a vast space—it’s extraordinary the expanse of space that opens up when the tide rolls out. I spent a lot of time there drawing and thinking about the installation, and some of the drawings that emerged made me want to do an actual durational tidal drawing from low tide to high tide. Because the main work was based at the Bay of Fundy, I then wanted to make something more local to the gallery.

I wanted to start the first work from the Halifax side of the harbour at low tide and work from the top of the paper downwards, for the duration of the incoming tide, drawing the tide inwards, towards the body.

At high tide, the tide has a moment of being still, akin to the moment between breathing in and breathing out—a pause. At this pause I took the ferry to the other side of the harbour in Dartmouth to find a site. I then set myself up and started a second work working from the bottom of the paper upwards, drawing outwards, away from the body, as the tide drew out.

My intention was to create a psycho-topographical landscape of how we perceive the motion of immense volumes of water. That’s a fluxing reality, and so the drawing process is abstracted. The form and dynamic of the abstraction is drawn from the imagining of water pushing into landscape, the relationship of water meeting the land, and the continuation of the water body drawing away again. In other words, I’m working with the threshold spaces of tidal and perceptual motion.