Susan Northcott
I've never been to Langley Bog, a wetland in the Derby Reach area, partly converted to cranberry fields, and in times gone by strip mined for its peat. But thanks to the works of artists Suzanne Northcott and Doris Auxier, and musician Jeff Warren, I feel I know this place... not as a physical geography so much as a rich ecology of images and sounds.
The three collaborated in Bog: Transformation & Memory, which showed at the Fort Gallery last summer, and more recently was the subject of a Langley Arts Council ARTalk Jan. 29 organized by artist, teacher and local impresario Betty Spackman.
Their works - the layered 'patterns' of Suzanne Northcott; 'tangled' investigations of Doris Auxier; and evocative soundscapes of Jeff Warren - look at a complex and delicate environment from unique perspectives. But the result is as deep and interwoven in its own way as the sphagnum moss, which is an identifying feature of the bog.
All three struggle to put into words their own particular vision of the Bog. Suzanne uses the analogy of the elephant being touched by the blind man - there's something big and meaningful out there, but it's important that we struggle to describe it. "The mystery, and the impossibility, and the ambiguity, and the inarticulatibility of it is its power," she commented during an interview in her Fort Langley studio.
Her response has been a study of the banded zones of water, grass, moss, forest and sky that coalesce in her images of the bog. Suzanne sees patterns of order and chaos, stillness and motion in the layered ecology. Beauty strikes her as an overwhelming quality, and art as the transformative process that makes artist and viewer 'aware of consciousness'.
"There's this place that I think a lot of people are kind of discovering, where you can be in the world without taking it too personally," she explained. "So there's a chance to observe from a place that has no agenda. That's the place of interaction and observation that I want to be in, and over time it feels that that place of observation - there's something very universal about it."
Doris Auxier
Doris extracts deeper and deeper levels of meaning from an 'obsession' with the particular. The fact that the bog has been transformed by human activity, and that the Greater Vancouver Regional District is trying to bring it back to a more natural state, became an initial focus.
"The human rubbing up against nature, that social history interested me a lot," she said. The friction of human activity scars the land and ultimately erases the unique values of places like Langley Bog. So its restoration and an artistic rendering of its surviving nature are - in a sense - acts of memory that recall its special character.
"I don't want everything to look the same," Doris said. "Everything everywhere we turn, we create the same. And this is something that's different. It's wild. It has its own sort of system and it has dignity within that, and should be protected."
While it's essential to Doris's artistic process to contemplate the social, historical and scientific content of her subjects, she's 'not interested' in art as social commentary and isn't sure how aware her viewers will ultimately be of the contextual dimensions. This is especially so because much of her art investigates elements of reality 'in isolation'. For Doris a tangled bit of string or a hank of sphagnum moss considered in 'arbitrary' isolation contain almost infinite layers of meaning - like DNA, but with intuition guiding the process of discovery and unfolding.
Environmentalism, social history, scientific theory, all those influences and more are there in Doris's work. But ultimately her paintings are not about those disciplines so much as the delicate wonder of the thing itself. "It's all of these things, but the attraction is its fragility and its wildness," she said.
The artist's way of knowing is 'much more intuitive' than the ways of her colleagues at Trinity Western University. It's not a case of 'throwing off analysis' Doris explains; instead art adds a perspective that can reveal things perhaps not visible through a microscope.
"I really respect what the environmentalists and the field scientists are doing there," she said. "But as an artist that isn't my primary way of knowing. It's something that's going to be much more intuitive, gathering information in a different way. It's going to be analytical, but it's going to be different than a scientist gathering analytical stuff."
Jeff Warren
For Jeff the bog became a composite of sounds woven into a three movement soundscape. But the sounds he'd expected to find were no longer reverberating through wetlands, or they had been overlaid by newer, invasive sounds: the drone of aircraft overhead, traffic noise, the thrum of human activity.
"I was really hoping to start with lots of natural sounds," Jeff said, "but one thing that isn't preserved is the soundscape. As much as people want to keep certain places untouched, we can never keep an area untouched with the reach that sound has."
This infusion of man-made sound constitutes more than just a masking of the natural sounds Jeff went looking for with his sensitive equipment. Like adding a touch of lemon to a glass of water, it changed the nature of the soundscape into something quite different.
"By adding new sounds to an area, it actually changes the way that natural sounds interact," he said. "There's been lots of research on the ways that adding human-made sounds into a soundscape alters animal sounds." For example, birds will integrate 'exterior sounds' into their calls in response to human activity. "Our own sounds affect the natural soundscape, the soundscape of creatures and trees, in ways that we don't always know, or we haven't researched yet."
To portray the bog as it exists today Jeff took a segment of Celtic music, first transcribed in the 19th Century, which represented the cultural use of peat as a source of fuel; the ever present plash and trickle of water, as the enduring undertone of the wetland; and the pervasive drone of industry and aircraft to signify the impinging world of present-day activity. Most of the sounds were composed, not recorded directly at the bog.
The drone, for instance, is a laminate of bass tones. "When I created my drone I used layers and layers of double-bass. I used all the same pitch, a D but played at all different octaves, mixed together to create that drone. I was really looking for the relationship between the drone of industry and the drone of Celtic music."
His soundscape contributed a temporal dimension to the group show. "Being a time-based medium I felt like I could explore or travel through a history of the bog in a way that may have been more difficult in a static visual piece."
Although his aural approach to the bog partly determined what he brought into the group show, Jeff believes he, Suzanne and Doris would have looked at quite different facets anyway. "Even if all of us had used the same medium, I still think we would have found three very different approaches to the same subject, which I think is very interesting as well."
