project for paper
a series of installations and works on paper & canvas responding to local history and culture using paper and canvas casts of tree stumps
NELSON, british columbia
located on the tum xula7xw/traditional territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx/the Sinixt People
2008 - 2010
Begun during a residency at the Oxygen Art Center in Nelson, B.C., Project for Paper mapped local history and culture through a series installations that used paper and canvas casts of tree stumps found both in urban (Nelson) and rural (Howser Creek) areas. With information collected and collated from local sources during the residency, paper casts were made by covering stumps in successive layers of thin paper with printed or hand-drawn information about the locale (e.g. contours lines, roadways, property lines).
installation detail: canvas covers a recently cut cedar in a clearcut section of Howser Creek, British, Columbia, 2009
OXYGEN ART CENTRE is an artist-run centre in Southeastern British Columbia. CLICK icon for details.
Old-growth cedar stumps in the remote clearcuts of Howser Creek were covered in canvas, contours lines resonating with woodgrain as roadways and property lines cut through decades of dendrochronological data. An elegiac gesture to the devastation caused by the resource plunder, these works were retrieved the following year. Some were never seen again.
