Friday, May 2, 2008

Artists create a 'living room' in park

By Dan Hilborn, Burnaby Now assistant editor
Published Sept. 17, 2003


Imagine a room made entirely of plants and trees.

Now imagine that room lit up like a lantern, with the light of the setting sun filtered through its green, leafy walls.

That is exactly what you'd find in Deer Lake Park this week, as two artists - one well known in Burnaby, and the second on a professional visit from England - have created one of the first 'tree weave' projects in Canada.

This unique "living room," made up of marsh grasses and other plants woven into a small grove of trees, is now under construction in the large outdoor amphitheatre of Deer Lake Park.

While the tree weave room is being built just because the artists think it's a neat idea, it will be ready in time for the Night of 2003 Lights festival taking place this Saturday, Sept. 20.

"I've been wanting to create something like this around Deer Lake for quite a while," says Sharon Kallis, who has worked for the past decade as a fine arts leader and ceramics teacher at the Shadbolt Centre.

"In the past, I've gathered leaves in the park to sew them into garments and use them as installations in my work, but I wanted to take it a step further," Kallis says. "The fact that this is going to be ready for the Night of 2003 Lights is just serendipity."

Another serendipitous factor is the involvement of Johanna Jardine, a traveling artist from England.

Jardine recently completely a one-month residency program at the University of British Columbia where she made willow sculptures. Because she was working on projects with a natural theme, she learned about Kallis' work in Burnaby and made the trip to the Shadbolt Centre to see what was happening. The pair decided they wanted to work on a collaboration, and in a matter of days, the tree weave project just sort of fell together.

"I sat down in the park and saw this beautiful, manicured lawn and the flowers by the lake. That's when Sharon had to go to a meeting, so I pulled out a sketchbook and started drawing," Jardine says.

When Kallis returned from her meeting and looked at the conceptual ideas that Jardine had sketched, she said the drawings of the tree weave room were almost exactly what she had pictured in her mind.

Within days, the two artists were out in the lake gathering the long, green, grassy reeds needed to create their 'living room.'

Jardine calls the tree weave project "site specific art" because it is shaped by the trees and reeds taken right out of the park itself. "If this was built around a different tree, it would be a completely different structure," she says.

Construction of the tree weave project will continue throughout the week, and the public is invited to come down to the park and add their own creative touches to the work.

She notes that because the art is made up entirely of living plant material, the structure will gradually turn brown as it ages, and will eventually decay.

Jardine says one of her main reasons for creating this kind of work is to encourage people to think differently about their surroundings.

"It's about being out here and getting people to see the space they walk past each day," she says. "It' also about handing this space over to nature to see it decay and see what nature does to it. If it's left long enough, it will eventually feed the trees in the inevitable cycle of nature."

Kallis says she is looking forward to creating a piece of work that will only last a short while.

"There's something very liberating about making ephemeral work. It's there for a moment, and then it's a memory," says the artist who usually works with clay. "For me, this brings out the control issues with art. Here, you take this piece and you turn it over to nature."

Kallis notes that passersby often have different views of the tree weave.

One visitor is a traveling Zen master from Taiwan who stopped and did his daily meditations beside the artwork.

Another visitor was a retired SFU physics professor who called the structure an "Aeolian loom" because the effect of the wind caused the cross pieces of the walls to vibrate in harmonic frequencies.

Jardine and Kallis say their work still does not have an official name, but they're not too worried about that aspect of the art. "We've been calling it the tree weave, but maybe it will have another name at some point. Who knows?" Kallis asks.

The tree weave living room project is still under construction in the meadow below the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. It is located about halfway along the east-side walking path that connects the arts centre to the lake shore trail, and the public is invited to stop by and add their creations to the work.

The tree weave will also be on display when the Night of 2003 Lights lantern festival takes place in Deer Lake Park on the night before the autumnal equinox, Saturday, Sept. 20.

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