An orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system that charts the relative position of the planets and their moons.

By Haley Bassett, August 26th 2020

“whatever grounds me, draws from a great distance” 

Donna Kane, ‘Oh Be a Fine Girl, Kiss Me’

For this week’s edition, I was able to speak with celebrated local writer Donna Kane, author of two poetry collections, Somewhere, a Fire and Erratic, as well as the memoir Summer of the Horse. Her latest collection of poems, Orrery, is set to hit shelves September 19th.

Her most recent poetic endeavour was inspired by the Pioneer 10 space probe. Launched in 1972, and tasked with collecting data on Jupiter’s moons for only 18 months, Pioneer 10 far outlasted its original mission and continued to relay data well beyond its planned trajectory. NASA collected information from the probe until 2003. When its signal became weak, and its data of little use, NASA cut off communications with the probe, which continues to sail beyond our solar system. Scientists predict that Pioneer 10 will be in orbit billions of years from now, long after the sun has swallowed the Earth, meaning that the plucky probe will far outlast its creators.

For Kane, Pioneer 10’s lonely pilgrimage stirred questions of materiality, consciousness, mortality, and the transformation of an object to a concept. Orrery, like its namesake, puts heavenly bodies in relation to each other. In its pages, Kane employs the unmanned spacecraft to give us a perspective into where we fit in the universe. In this work, blood, shale, ants and helium vector magnetometers are not individual objects, but parts of a composite whole that transcend their materiality.

An enormous amount of research, introspection and travel has gone into creating Orrery, which comes seventeen years in the making. Kane travelled to all of Pioneer 10’s haunts around the globe, including the TRW Inc. facility in San Jose where the probe was built, its launch pad in Florida, as well as its replica in the Smithsonian. At the museum, Kane was able to have a unique experience with the spacecraft, which was in the process of being restored. During her visit, she witnessed Pioneer 10 as a disassembled collection of parts laid out on a table. A powerful piece of technology and a symbol of human ingenuity dissected into various scraps of metal, the mechanics of a concept.

Kane’s work is accessible yet layered, and her underlying intent can be gleaned with multiple readings. Her poetry grounds the human existence against this known universe, pinging from the macro to the micro like a signal travelling from a satellite to the Earth. She contemplates the large, existential questions with as much ease as she observes the minutiae of everyday life. One example of this elasticity in her words is the poem ‘On the Material World’:

For years, I tried to picture the Earth’s orbit,

the elliptical geometry of the seasons,

the eight distinct phases of the moon.

One night my husband brought me

an egg, an orange and a flashlight:

Here, you hold the Earth and the moon

and I’ll sun the flashlight on them. I watched the light

raise the ridge of his collarbone, the blade

of each shoulder as he turned, and later—

my arm on the oak slab desk, my thick-barrelled pen

writing thick-barrelled pen, the bronze lamp lit—

I tried again to imagine the Earth’s spin and tilt

in the eye of my mind, but couldn’t detach

from my bodied weight, the place where thought

took shape and mattered.

In addition to being a gifted writer, Donna Kane is a community-oriented, active member in the local and the larger Canadian writing scene. As the executive director of the Peace Liard Regional Arts Council, she organizes the annual literary festival Wild Words North, which will be held online this year from September 25th to the 27th. The stellar lineup of Canadian writers includes Jesse Thistle, Steven Price, Helen Knott, and Lorna Crozier, among many others. Look up the PLRAC website for more information. Get your copy of Orrery on the Harbour Publishing website or your local bookstore!

Check in next week for my conversation with internationally recognized sculptor and land artist Peter von Tiesenhasuen.

Do you have an artistic endeavour you would like to promote? I would love to speak with you! Please email me at programs@dcartgallery.ca.

Kane in her writing nook, surrounded by her influences.

By Haley Bassett, August 21st 2020

This week, I had the privilege of sitting down with visual artist turned writer Donna Kane. Our discussion ranged from the inspiration of her latest book to the concepts of art and poetry. Tune in next week for my article on Kane’s upcoming book of poems, Orrery.

As a visual artist who writes on the side, I came into the conversation with little knowledge of poetry. Like many angst-ridden, sad girls, I own a collection of poems by Sylvia Plath that is mostly ornamental. The depth of my appreciation of poetry is limited to song lyrics that I find particularly meaningful, so it is unsurprising that I would start our conversation with some very basic questions: what is poetry and why spend time on it?

Kane was generous in her answer. She explained that, for her, poetry is a means of exploring an idea or experience in an indirect way, which opens up the possibilities of discovery to a much wider scope than can be achieved with standard prose. By that logic, the value of poetry is in its openness. It is a meditation and an exercise in exploring the grey, the unexplained and the ineffable. It is a vehicle for piquing, but never sating, our curiosity.

That curiosity is one of the driving forces behind humanity’s impulse to create art in all forms. We spoke of this similarity between all art disciplines, and how poetry, like visual art and music, has many different genres for varying tastes. Kane proposes, and I wholeheartedly agree, that it is important to sample as many genres as possible to discover where your preferences lie. 

This is true for consumers of art as well as creators. A balanced art diet is necessary for discovering what art you prefer, as well of what sort of art you should create and for what purpose. This notion runs counter to the myth that artists must isolate themselves from the world and restrict their influences in order to be “original”. The fact is, art is powerful and we are all influenced by it whether we are conscious of it or not. So it is better to recognize and harness your influences rather than deny them. Some of Kane’s influences include Jan Zwycky, a philosopher and poet, as well as poets Lorna Crozier, Louise Glück and Wislawa Szymborska, among many others. Kane describes their poems as accessible yet deep and meaningful, and ideal as a beginner’s guide to poetry.

During my recent conversation with visual artist Barbara Swail (check out Issue 3 of NAR!), she too maintained that the arts are a language that is meant to communicate something that cannot be expressed directly. What you intend to communicate depends on the medium with which you choose to express it, as each medium, whether it be a lyric, short story or oil painting, has its own baggage and historical meanings attached to it. Our main tool for finding those meanings is the glossary of symbols and their connotations that recur throughout art history. All artists inherit and work within that existing canon of symbols, and to create outside of it, or to create something truly “original”, would be an attempt to communicate something in an alien, and ultimately useless, language.

Art exists on its own, but it comes alive when it is shared. For Kane, art is about community, and she credits the many artists, poets and writers who have encouraged her to create, whose work continues to inspire her. Therefore, it is important for her to publish and share her work, in order to add her piece to the conversation, so that it might inspire others, as others have inspired her. 

Check in again next week for my article on Kane’s newest creation, Orrery, which was sparked by the Pioneer 10 space probe and centres around questions of consciousness and materiality.

Do you have an artistic endeavour you would like to promote? I would love to speak with you! Please email me at programs@dcartgallery.ca.

Swail in studio.

By Haley Bassett, August 13th 2020

Entire mountainsides rusting with ghostly pine trees. Acres of forest and whole communities devastated by wildfire. Saturated land and shrinking growing seasons that challenge livelihood and sustenance. Mining effluent desecrating waterways and habitats. Have you felt disquieted by the altering landscapes around you? Burdened with a profound but unnamed loss that comes with the violation of your sense of place?

There’s a word for that familiar feeling: solastalgia. Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005, it is the emotional or existential stress caused by negative change to one’s home environment. Albrecht describes it as a lived experience of distress, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.” 

Though the sudden environmental changes—extreme weather, climate change or destructive industrial activity—inducing this melancholia are stacking up, the concept is still a neologism, or a relatively new term that has yet to be accepted into the common vernacular. Local artist Barbara Swail’s latest body of work, titled SOLASTALGIA, is set to pave the way for Northern audiences. Part of the Artist in Residence exhibit, Swail’s series is a meditative attempt at acquainting the wider public with this concept, so that they may put a name to the distress they feel when their environment is altered.

Of the three artists showing in the AIR exhibit, currently on display at the Dawson Creek Art Gallery, Swail is the most outspoken in her inquiry into environmental issues. Her work is politically charged; however, she hopes that by tackling the all too often ignored emotional impact of environmental change, she can create a gateway to the conversation rather than add to the polarization around the subject.

This is a valid concern for an artist who lives and works within the Montney Formation, the epicentre of oil and gas activity in BC. While the industry took hold in the region as recently as the early 2000s, its widespread impacts, and prospects, have become a part of daily life in Dawson Creek and neighboring communities. As an artist steeped in this social climate, Swail is compelled to make honest work surrounding issues that are pertinent to her local audience. However, it is a fine balance to showcase the effects of a destructive industry to those living and working in its midst without alienating them.

In search of this balance, Swail has developed her new series through a unique combination of collage, photo transfer, photographic prints and chalk pastel. The results are vibrant and haunting; SOLASTALGIA lures you in aesthetically and leaves you unsettled, which is achieved largely through Swail’s use of unnatural, fluorescent colour, as well as her juxtaposition of pristine landscapes with collaged images of local oil and gas facilities and garbage piles.

The subject of her artistic oeuvre is the Pouce River, which she has hiked with her partner most weeks for more than a decade. Over this period of time, Swail has photographed the naturally occurring changes of the river. Through this process, she has come to know it intimately and learnt to appreciate its nuances, as evidenced in her previous work Bank Series. In SOLASTALGIA, however, this careful meditation on the river has been unceremoniously interrupted. By collaging images of local gas facilities within the landscape, Swail imagines what it would be like to encounter such a fearsome sight on a weekly trip to the river. This work encapsulates a feeling that is no doubt familiar to many who live in a region where oil rigs are known to erupt around the landscape like daisies.

To develop this series, Swail was mentored by curator Paul Crawford and artist Peter von Tiesenhausen as part of the Peace Liard Regional Arts Council’s AIR program. Crawford and Tiesenhausen also mentored Karl Mattson and mary mottishaw, who are exhibiting alongside Swail with their respective shows, Thoughts of Love, Meditations of Violence, and meander, which are on display at the Dawson Creek Art Gallery until September 4th.

Stay tuned next week for my conversation with Donna Kane on her new book Orrery: Poems.

Do you have an artistic endeavour you would like to promote? I would love to speak with you! Please email me at programs@dcartgallery.ca.