Process: Homesteads and Ghost Towns

Gabrielle Roy's Fragiles lumières de la terre (1978) is a collection of non-fiction that spans her entire career. I found the chapters on immigrant communities quite interesting thinking back on my train trip across the Prairies. The author writes of Manitoba and her encounters with several ethnic communities: the Doukhobors, who immigrated from Russia beginning in 1898; the Hutterites, who arrived from Germany in 1918; and the Mennonites, who settled in Canada from Russia between 1923-1927. The Prairies have always intrigued me because my grandmother hails from a small francophone village in Saskatchewan. And yet this chapter of Canadian history that focuses on the homesteading process is largely unknown to me.

 

Melville, Saskatchewan

 

Case in point. One morning of my train trip, traveling eastward from Vancouver, I sat with a young couple in the dining car for breakfast. They were very soft spoken and I could detect what I thought was a German accent. I was puzzled however because they said they had moved to British Colombia from Paraguay. As we had been talking about Montreal’s multilingual aspect, I thought it odd the fact that they spoke German and Spanish — they were not languages that I normally associated with each other. In retrospect, after reading Roy’s book, I realized that they were probably Mennonites. Upon further research, I discovered that Paraguay was a sought after destination for German immigrants in the 1920’s and 30s as they were promised homesteads, religious freedom and the right to practice their language. A Canadian group from Manitoba founded the Menno colony in Paraguay (1926-1927).

 

Melville, Saskatchewan

 

Reading Susanna Moodie’s “Journey into the Woods” (Roughing It in the Bush, 1852), which describes her family's venture deep into a forested marsh to develop their homestead, I thought of my own grandparents’ attempts to better their lives by moving to a new environment. Though they displaced themselves inter provincially, if one considers Canada’s large landmass and the harsh terrain at the time, it was still a considerable distance to travel to meet the unknown.

Growing up, I never tired of hearing the story of how my grandmother came to Sudbury to marry my grandfather. It’s only now that I recognize how her eastward trip was effectively the same journey  — in reverse — that her own father, Théophile Leclerc, had undertaken to reach his homestead in the wilds of the Saskatchewan bush.

 

 

Théophile Leclerc and Philomène Drolet were married in Ste-Catherine, Québec in 1907 and established themselves in Pont Rouge. The couple moved with their three children to Shell River, Saskatoon five years later. Théophile had accepted a homestead, sight unseen, in Debden, a small village where the majority of the population has Fransaskois origins. The lot of land turned out to be in a remote region, hidden away in thick forest and bogland. He needed to clear the trees before he could even build a makeshift shelter. This shack, originally supposed to be a temporary dwelling, served as the family home for a period of 20 years as Théophile was often away for work in Saskatoon, Marcelin and Edmonton. Philomène was left at home with six children: Ovila, Jeannette, Noella, Cécile, Lucien and my grandmother, Florence.

On October 19th, 1939, Florence Germaine Leclerc took her own journey east in search of work, hitching a ride with other travelers to Northern Ontario. Hardly speaking a word of English, she embarked to start a new life in Sudbury with a mere $400.00 in her pocket. After a brief stint as a chambermaid in a downtown boarding house, the parish priest found her employment with the widower J. A. Lapalme, father of 8 children. They married the following May and she bore him another 7 children. My paternal grandfather's ancestors go back thirteen generations to Martin Janson (1605) in St-Sulpice, Paris, France.

I'd like to travel to Debden someday so that I can fully understand the courage it took for my grandmother to pack up and travel to a place unknown.

 

Falconbrige, Ontario

 

My maternal grandmother, Loretta Alma McPhail (b.1912), grew up on a farm in Whitefish, Ontario with her 4 sisters and one brother. She often spoke of her second adopted brother, Wilbur McNab. Her aunt had also adopted his brother Robert. The children were sent to Canada from overseas (Isle of Mull, Scotland) during the war. Everyone called her brother Charlie. Charlie Hamilton.

As my grandmother was Catholic, she had to elope to marry my grandfather, John Desmond McPhail (b. 1904) a Protestant whose ancestors hailed from Torosay, on the Isle of Mull. They were married August 26, 1932 in Espanola. His parents only learned of the marriage many months later. I remember her telling me stories about how she first met her "Jack". She said she knew upon seeing him for the first time, that she would marry him. He was a tall, handsome fellow playing the banjo at the dance hall.

Her father, Désiré Hamilton, was born in Ste-Félicité in 1879, but raised and educated in Sayabec, Québec. He married Odila Boulay (b. 1974) in Matane, Gaspé. In 1899, they moved to Victoria Mines in Walden, Ontario where he worked until 1910. Désiré then began farming in the summer and working in lumber camps in the winter. He did so until 1917 when he was employed by INCO to work at the old O’Donnell ore roast yard, west of Copper Cliff.

 

Falconbrige, Ontario

 

While the Walden region is made up of the communities of Lively, Naughton, Worthington and Beaver Lake, three ghost towns are also situated within its limits – Victoria Mines, High Falls and Creighton. Victoria Mines was a company town that sprang up around the Canadian Pacific Railway line and the Mond Nickel Company mine and smelter, which was established in 1900. Abandoned after the mine’s closure in 1913, it became a ghost town. In fact, many of the town’s buildings were moved to Coniston using the CP Rail line where a Presbyterian church still remains standing. Jeri Danyleyko’s Ontario Ghost Towns site highlights Victoria Mines complete with historic maps and archival images.

I think of how a good many of my friends seem so mobile today, ready to pack up and move at a moment’s notice for the promise of a good job: off eastward to the Maritimes, off to oil country out west, even overseas. Considering Théophile and Désiré’s displacements a century ago, perhaps today's mobility is not really a new occurrence? People undertook various jobs, often in dangerous conditions, and traveled great distances to support their families. These ghost towns are now the only trace of bustling company towns that attracted workers from all over Canada and beyond.

When I look back on my grandmother’s journey, I think that people also have an innate lust for adventure, a yearning for freedom and new beginnings. Migration and displacement will always play an important part in history based on a multitude of economic and social factors.

Story: Panache Lake / Lac Panache (PA-1)

View Tongue PA-1 in a larger map

 

Lac Panache: 45.5N -73.583333W

Julie Lapalme
Montréal, Québec
October 9, 2010

Roughing it in the Bush, first published in 1852, recounts Susanna Moodie’s settler adventure in the Canadian wilderness. In 1834, the Moodie family moved to a bush farm near Douro Towneship north of Peterborough. In “Burning the Fallow”, she describes the discovery of Lake Katchewanooka in such terms as to suggest she has made a new friendship.

Moodie had made during the winter a large clearing of twenty acres around the house. The progress of the workmen had been watched by me with the keenest interest. Every tree that reached the ground opened a wider gap in the dark wood, giving us a broader ray of light and a clearer glimpse of the blue sky. But when the dark cedar-swamp fronting the house fell beneath the strokes of the axe, and we got a first view of the lake, my joy was complete: a new and beautiful object was now constantly before me, which gave me the greatest pleasure. By night and day, in sunshine or in storm, water is always the most sublime feature in a landscape, and no view can be truly grand in which it is wanting. From a child, it always had the most powerful effect upon my mind, from the great ocean rolling in majesty, to the tinkling forest rill, hidden by the flowers and rushes by the bank. Half the solitude of my forest home vanished when the lake unveiled its bright face to the blue heavens, and I saw sun, and moon, and starts, and waving trees reflected there. I would sit for hours at the window as the shades of evening deepened round me, watching the massy foliage of the forests pictures in the waters, till fancy transported me back to England, and the songs of birds and the lowing of cattle were sounding in my ears. It was long, very long before I could discipline my mind to learn and practice all the menial employment which are necessary in a good settler’s wife. (281-282)

I could relate to her description, as my own Lac Panache is like a dear friend that I visit regularly throughout all four seasons. The lake has seen me grown up on her shores. I’ve fished for rockbass off the dock with my cousins, lazily slumbered on an air mattress carried by her gently rippling surface, explored her inlets by canoe and pedal boat, plunged into her cool depths after a sauna, and swam as far as I could from shore before returning to the safety of the cottage. But most of all, I’ve simply sat and watched the sun quiver on her vast expanses, I listened to loons call out to her.

 

 

When I dream of Panache, it is often from a bird’s eye view. I cover the distance between one end of the lake and another with a rise and a swoop to skim the surface without going under; there I see shadows, large moving forms. When I do dream I am swimming in her depths, I am not alone. She is squirming with creatures of all kinds. A complex, mysterious friend, but a faithful one.

 

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Process: Schnabel and Goodwyn

Planned a stopover in Toronto on my way to Sudbury so that I could visit the AGO. Perfect timing, as I was able to see substantial work from Julian Schnabel and Shary Boyle — Flesh and Blood was an impressive collection of her intriguing and masterful porcelain pieces while his Art & Film exhibit was the first time I had seen so many of his works in one place.

A series of his paintings dealt with the practice of bullfighting — very large surface areas with smudged shapes, as if he had dipped beef quarters or sheep carcasses in paint to then imprint them onto the canvas. I found El Espontaneo (for Abelardo Martinez) (Oil and banner on tarpaulin, 1990) more successful than the scarlet Anno Domino because of the colour choices. The pink and tan make the gory scene subtler somewhat, but nonetheless disquieting, muffled. I also enjoyed the slick and almost quivering Portrait of Bella and Lolita (Oil and resin on canvas, 2007). The purity of the colour, l’éclat, seemed to match the lucid gazes of the girls.

I appreciated his reflection on process:

“The movies were more real to me than my life was at home. And whether it’s a screen in a movie or whether it’s the rectangle that is the perimeter of a painting, it’s an arena where this battle takes place, between everything that you know and don’t know. And I think that I apply the same system to both paintings and films. I don’t know what it’s going to look like when I’m done. I know how to start. I know how to lean towards the divine light. But I figure it out as I’m going along. And the process of doing, that’s the thing.”

There were also exhibits dedicated to three artists who shared a deep commitment to their studio practice: Betty Goodwyn, Work Notes, Eva Hesse, Studiowork and Agnes Martin, Work Ethic. I was instantly drawn to the Goodwyn room because it included a large display of her notebooks. A small room set the stage before entering the exhibit. It displayed all the process materials related to Parcel for Karachi (Parcel VIII), 1971: the parcel that was used to make the soft ground impression on the copper plate, the copper plate itself, and the final etching.

A series of photos (Gelatin silver prints, 1942) by Welsh artist Geoffrey James depicted Goodwyn’s Montreal studio on Avenue Coloniale in 1994. It was an unprecedented glimpse in the objects and forms that moved and inspired her: a mirrored cabinet, a copy of Rilke’s Selected Poems, rusty metal tools laid out like an anthropological display, postcards, photos, sketches, box-like containers and ephemera such as nests, twigs, moss and wire.

Audio interviews with art dealer René Blouin and photographer Geneviève Cadieux gave insight into Goodwyn’s studio practice. Blouin recollected on how the artist’s studio space had no windows so that, in her words, “energy could not escape”, though a skylight did give the effect of shadowless pure light. A video in another room revealed how she had gutting out and redesigned her studio space. The light quality was indeed ethereal, like a sealed, quiet bubble.

Cadieux talked of her own art process and how “space affects work of art”. For her, Goodwyn’s studio was a continual work in progress, gathering all the pieces that were not yet resolved.  Indeed, her notebooks were infused with this incomplete aura, filled with fragmented sentences and hurried sketches at times, and at other times, elaborate plans and detailed scribbles. Out of all the notebooks, I saw only one with a French sentence: veste sur un support – foncé, vulnerable (Notebook 62, 1972 – 1976). Another notebook has stamped dates as if the dates were inserted after the fact. Of interest was her rigid documentation process: if she gave someone a sketch from her notebook, she would make a photocopy and insert it in her notebook as a placeholder (Notebook 93, 1985 – 1988).

I responded to the following entry — wavering between self-chiding and encouragement — the exclamation marks like a nudge in the ribs to work harder!

Betty Goodwyn, Notebook 90, 1985

2.25.85
Hovering fear – greatly [disappointed] with myself about the “Pierre incident” – the whole circle of bitterness  - anger – competitiveness – Focus on studio – work “notebooks” and catalogue! What a dispersed weak psyche – discouragement – pulled into the tornado – right into the heart of it. So anxious to put all that aside and move, develop drawings further – how to start on structures. Where to start with notebooks – [Losing] part of my privacy – but that is the burrowing and releasing”.
[transcribed as borrowing]

It was truly an inspiring show. To be able to glimpse into another artist’s creative process was quite humbling especially knowing that her studio was such a private creative space. She had created a luminous space free of outside distractions.

 

 

I thought of my own art studio and how I was not free of interruptions with the large window, the e-mails and the incessant phone calls. Yet, the light that filters through the greenery at a certain time of day is a welcome diversion, as is the dusk light at the waning of the day. Where I related most to Goodwyn was in the sense of urgency that emitted from her notebooks, the pressing need to create, to give form to vague thoughts and visions. After viewing the show, I myself was itching to get work on my Tongue Rug project.

I had originally wanted to build a life-size version of the Rolling Studio and then had settled for a virtual representation because of a lack of funds and space. The ironic thing is now that I do have the space and the time to create physical objects, I’ve come to reconsider my process. I do not necessarily need to construct objects in space. They already exist on a conceptual plane.

While I was doing my fieldwork, collecting data on my lakes during my cycling trips, the wheels of my bike became a sort of Rolling Studio. Likewise, the computer screen became the window facing onto the world of the structure. Between the bike and the computer, I have already created the studio. I don’t need to illustrate it; the Rolling Studio is about process. As Schnabel said, "the process of doing, that's the thing".

In the same way, the web nurtures online communities. I do not need to create a formal Parlour Room to house the tongue rug and solicit feedback. The blogosphere itself is the tongue rug.

Progress: October 6, 2010

Continued work on the Sladdakavring Icons, adorning all the tongues with the chosen keywords from the associated blog postings.

I then re-worked my Tongue Rug mock-up. The first version reminded me of snowshoes somewhat: leather tongues with what resembled catgut stitching. Used an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) filter to achieve a charcoal finish on the embroidered edges.

 

 

Though I wanted to capture a hand drawn look and feel, I chose the filter knowing ASCII is a common way to encode characters to transmit data from one database to another — thought it fitting considering this project’s focus on language and archives.

 

 

This Tongue Rug has more of a cartography feel to it, in part because of the choice of a Calligraphic Script font. I'm inspired to start work on the maps. I am starting to envision the possibilities for an animated version of the sladdakavring. À venir.