The Stories come seeking Stories that want to be told come in through the eastern window in the morning, or sometimes down onto the roof with the rain. There’s a beautiful one that follows me everywhere I go now, about the water that washes the eastern shore on Georgian Bay and how that is like, and also not like the ocean that kisses and smashes and chortles the eastern shores of the Shetland Islands. This story is long like a river that runs deep then dives deeper, to run beneath the desert. There’s another about trumpeter Swans who were many, then few, then gone for a hundred years, hunted into oblivion by europeans. Now the imprint of those wild ones on the land teaches the new, tame ones how to be who they are. The tame ones teach the humans to be …better. There are the stories a Mother Tree whispers to me – the one that once grew right here, the beating heart of the great breathing forest that lived – lives! she says – along the flanks of Lake Ontario, sheltered by the arms of the limestone escarpment. They come in the window and through the roof with pictures and sounds to show me. Listen. Can you hear this? Can you see how this is, how it connects with that? Look at this marvel! Listen. And so I get to work, and write. Draw containments for these, paint them, sing them, play them. I’ve just sent two applications in to Banff Centre for the Arts for month long residencies this year, timed after my commission work has been completed and distributed with love. What I’ll build at the Banff residency is a visual language that matches the stories that come in, asking to be told. I’ll work with colour, water, gravity, resist, paper and time. The musical language will develop too – downstairs in the room I’ve made for it, in car rides between here and my cabin, and on the road between here and Banff this summer and early fall. That Banff Centre will of course choose to invite me or not; I’ll know by May. If not Banff, then from a back yard studio in Vernon, or a cabin on Lake Superior. From the blue artist’s studio at the edge of the ocean in the Shetland Islands. Either way, the stories will be told, and I will find a visual and musical language for them. This is the road I’ve chosen. I will need help. I can’t tell the stories the way they’re asking to be told, without readers, without input, without research and connection, without funding assistance. Without performance venues, walls to hang the work on, other artists to work with and pay with respect, audiences to sing the music with. Without a family of collaborators. Become a Patron This is a link to my Patreon site, where you’ll find some options for collaboration with me and these stories. Benefits, too, as sincere tokens of my appreciation and love. If you join me as a patron, I will take you with me on the road, into the studio, the residencies, the water, the forests. Your story will mingle and connect with these ones, and you will be included in the books, songs and paintings that will be made. You will have my rich and enduring gratitude and love. Most of the content on this website will continue to be free. I’ve been writing here for ten years and many life changes, and I love the connection it provides. Please consider, though, that this space takes great time and effort to build, develop, evolve, enrich. If you feel inclined to support this, even for the cost of a good coffee every month, the space and the work I do will only get better. I am and will continue to be eternally grateful for your collaboration and support. Nothing in this world happens in isolation; we’re all in this together.
Cat, processing, news. This sixteen-year-old cat I foster spends her first week here under a blanket. She drinks water and sleeps. Processing, it feels like. The loss of her former foster dad, who had to move into long-term care. The four days she spent at a shelter full of a full spectrum of other cats, all negotiating and maintaining territory. She was de-clawed (before it became illegal). The morning I picked her up she got into a violent fight with someone in the cage below her, arrived here furious and terrified. I think of how all living things exist in collaboration with each other. How breathing itself is an exchange between people and green leaves. How our bodies themselves are ecosystems – many species in (hopefully) collaborative balance, i.e. no bacteria = no digestion. So exquisitely, elegantly symbiotic: we are a community of neighbourhoods made of living things, each making use of the waste or the fruit of the other. People of all living species. It works just fine in a culture of mutual respect. How good we’ve become at forgetting this. Baffling, that humans dance this illusion of separation, imagine that we stand alone in this world – doing TO it, rather than with. Such deep, inconsolable loneliness. The path of distortions is there to see: ‘Us’ becomes ‘Us vs Them’ when you insert money, which doesn’t breathe or poop or eat or live. It abstracts our connection to the world, and invariably begets an irrational fear of lack, of separateness. Fear becomes isolation and distrust, and all of a sudden we have no friends. We can’t breathe. Disempowered by our imagined separateness, hoarding money to compensate (which of course it doesn’t). In a recent discussion with an artist friend the question arose: is it possible to teach empathy? Well I think you need two things for that. The right story, and someone’s willingness to hear it. An opening in a place that’s habitually closed. Sometimes it takes a shock to create those openings in people who have developed thick callouses. Callouses made of money, I wonder. They are planning to sell the forests of Ontario for money, destroy the ecosystem of Georgian Bay, force an oil pipeline through unceded indigenous territory, build a new and expensive tar sands operation in Alberta. For money. We all know that these are not good plans. Those trees they want to sell make the oxygen we breathe. Those trees absorb carbon. I’m a year into my residency here. Like Mia the foster cat, I’m a much different creature than the one who lived in the middle of the red light district for a month last January, who moved into a third floor walk-up and stayed there for six weeks in reaction, who found an apartment with squirrels in every ceiling beside the big old trees in Gage Park and transferred 30 years of (culled) stuff here from storage. Vinyl, books, lamps, a music library, old knitting projects.. I finished the masters on the big oak dining room table from my childhood, then cleared that off to work on art. I wrote about my dad’s passing in his wingback chairs. My old houseplants bloomed, I found new books, worked my way through to the other side of years of insomnia. I wrote and wrote and write and will write always, every day. In the studio I took old work and deconstructed it, then reconstructed. Tried every new thing I could think of including sculpture. Made lots and lots of interesting mistakes. Very humbling. My guides right now: Ursula le Guin, Diana Beresford Kroger, Paul Stamets (still), Indigenous Peoples, Trees. In the studio, the Beaver Halls, the Ninth Street Women, Agnes Martin, Mary Pratt, Emily, Georgia. Ancestors. The next two years of this residency will be more specifically curated than the first. I’m deeply excited about the projects that are on the boards – all symbiotic with one another and relevant to who and where we are now, together in this world. I’ve decided not to use this blog for announcements and updates. The purpose of this blog space, (now a decade old) is to reflect on the bigger picture. To listen and speak for a deeper hum, when I can hear it. And yet there is always news… Which is why I have a newsletter written and ready to send out. It includes brief updates about commissions, an intro to my longer term multi-arts project called Settled, Unsettled, a reading list and some less filtered opinion pieces from me and other artists. Also, and crucially, a bunch of ways we can connect, you and I – calls for your participation and involvement, stuff you can buy, and a calendar of my talks, workshops and open studio dates. I’ll publish these updates once a month via email (first one in the last week of February, so be sure sign up before then – see below). I really am excited about this thing. Not long, predominantly visual, and it’s interactive! Wooo. Technology is amazing. If you’re interested in drilling down into my work, please write to me at keira@keiramcarthur.ca – for now that’s the only way to get on the mailing list for the newsletter. I’m working with someone more tech-savvy than I to set up a gentle pop-up form here in the future – you’ll see it when it comes. I very much look forward to hearing from you. This website will also change in the next few months (studio work is a priority, so I’m not promising anything quick). The online gallery will get organized, this blog will have its own section, one also for reference photographs I like, and maybe music, and video. Grist for the Mill will likely become a reading list with some book and article reviews, links to interesting work that’s happening out there. I’ll write more about all of this in the newsletter. The sun just came out and it’s time for second coffee. Thanks for reading the long post – it’s been in the pipe for a while, Happy February, all.
tea lights This surprising year. This morning’s write is populated by a surprising jumble of images – the giant blue Christmas bulbs on the giant tree at the Distillery District’s outdoor Christmas market. A market that featured a Christmas Angel who wandered through big fat snowflakes and the crowds, occasional a capella singers, a snow-covered booth selling mulled cider and warmed the whole area with the smell of cinnamon, apple, nutmeg. Warm sunlight through the golden curtains of the curved tower room windows, spilling over the shoulders of my lovely daughter and across the old worn carpet. The clink of cutlery on breakfast dishes, cup on saucer beneath the rise and fall of engagement, conversation. The simple happy of my Mother’s rich red sweater. A painting of Guido Fox on the wall at The Duke of York. Ah. He was Spanish. Of course he was – why else would his effigy be burned in ritual these past 413 years, by inebriated English people? The welcome pause there, the sprint-walk back past Margaret’s house to the B&B, the gathering of family from across the city, our arrival like love spilling from the car and through the door, the all hands on deck preparation of feast, the sit down in gratitude and conviviality. Between us, ten countries and four continents traveled. Gathered at table from five different cities. All of us altered, in this surprising year. The Shape of Water – with courage, we find a way to move into what we love, no matter how fearsome or impossible the obstacles seem. Thank you Del Torno, for giving us this beautiful tale of a specific kind of defiance. Let the lanterns be lit and set on the sill. Like thoughts, like mulled cider to warm those we love who cannot join us in body, but join us nevertheless. I’m going to savour every one of these final days of the decade, the surprising year of 2019. May we all find a way to move into what we love. Happy Solstice, everyone.