onsite 24: migration

Marianna de Cola. Travelling the south shore of Newfoundland, 2010

This is one of the beautiful images sent to us by Marianna de Cola, from her study on migration and relocation in outport Newfoundland.  We used it for the cover of issue 24 because there is something so complete and yet so slow about leaving home by boat.  Where you came from recedes, is lost in fog, or over the horizon; your line of travel always marked by the wake scrolling out behind you.

coal mining towns

Eric Ravilious. The Vale of the White Horse,  circa 1939. Pencil and watercolour on paper: 451 x 324 mm Tate Collection N05164. This cutting of small villages into the landscape, especially in the L S Lowry painting (of yesterday's post) where in the front of the village are some fenced off yards as stony as can be, brings to mind the 3000 year-old Uffington White Horse cut into the Berkshire Downs.  These are inscriptions in the landscape, rather than sprawls across its surface. 

Nanaimo, which today sprawls determinedly north and west up the mountain, was originally a coal mining town, incised in the woods as a tidy fan-shaped diagram around the harbour.   You can see it drawing from the British colliery typology: small compact houses in small compact towns.  One can already see, in the 1891 map, new development inching northward.  In 1891, 762 working men lived in the south end; 70% were miners.  
They are almost gone, but Nicol Street (now the Island Highway going south) until fairly recently was lined with tiny miners' houses, no bigger than two rooms.  It was a rough place, early Nanaimo, very unlike its present prosperous and prolific self.

Nanaimo, 1891

colliery landscapes

L S Lowry. Hillside in Wales, 1962. Oil on canvas, 762 x 1016 mm. Tate Collection T00591The 1824 drawing of Bath reminded me very much of the 1962 L S Lowry painting of a coal mining village,  believed to be near Abertillery in South Wales.  It is another town carved out of the rural landscape: tight, dense and relentless.  Do we mistake this density for a kind of urbanity or should it be more realistically considered expeditious worker's housing, one step up from the hostels of Fort MacMurray, or South Africa.
Lowry didn't include the rest of the colliery landscape, seen in this photograph below, with the pit head at the end of the terrace.
It is this historic spatiality that allows England to fit 51 million people into an area a bit larger than Vancouver Island and still have huge agricultural landscapes, estates and forests. 

South Wales mining valley, early 20th century.

large landscapes, small signs

Drive in near Clayton, New Mexico. 1996Rural isolation is at the heart of Rosalie Gascoigne's work in yesterday's post.  Yes, rural communities are lively and busy, but these are islands of intensity in a much wider landscape that receives little human attention except for the extraction of resources or the harvesting of crops.  Small details such as highway signs, fenceposts, billboards, here a drive-in, there a barn from an earlier farming era, small towns – such things are left in place where they eventually fall down, bit by bit. 

According to the biographical material available on Gascoigne, from the beginning her work was made from salvaged iron and steel, wire, wooden boxes, construction debris: the detritus of rural occupation.  This is not the rubbish from aboriginal occupation which is in an entirely different realm, but rather the cast-offs of the struggle for settlers and farmers to bring an order to a huge landscape project. 

In the background of the old drive-in screen with its field of speaker posts is the armature of a centre-pivot irrigation system.  Its days are probably numbered as well.


Saskatchewan

Everett Baker. Joe Murray Family, 10 July 1954. Shaunavon, Saskatchewan

The Saskatchewan Communications Network (SCN) has been axed by the Saskatchewan's Wall government, saving $5 million a year.  SCN is one of a little clutch of provincial arts networks that comes with the basic package on Canadian satellite tv services: Knowledge Network in BC, TVOntario in Ontario and SCN.  Once there was Access in Alberta, radio and tv, but the Klein government divested themselves of cultural programming in the 1990s.  Access TV now is just a feeder for a lot of American programming via Global.  CKUA the radio part when independent, and survives still as an alternative music station. 

It seems today that with Saskatchewan entering a new era of huge prosperity through its oil revenues that $5 million a year is a very small sum to support such a good station.  I don't live in Saskatchewan, but I watch SCN a lot.  It has the kind of programming one used to hear about in the Netherlands, where little one-minute to five-minute gaps between programs are filled with shorts about poetry, about craft, about native grannies telling stories, about wind blowing across wheat fields. 

One of the first things I saw on it, years ago, was the photographs of Everett Baker, who, in his job with Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, travelled all over the province and took thousands of Kodachrome slides of all the people he came across between 1937 and the 1970s.  They are presented without voice-over, just as the images with music and run once or twice a week, always different, always fresh.  It is the Saskatchewan we knew about where all the older men looked like Tommy Douglas and mothers wore odd glasses.  Today it is all terribly poignant, given the changes Saskatchewan has seen over the last thirty years.  The grain elevators are gone, most of the towns, farms have been consolidated and they have a hard-line government in the Klein/Harper mode. 

SCN isn't all nostalgia and harvest suppers.  It also runs Rabbit Falls, a powerful drama series about contemporary reserve life, quite a bit on the RCMP and how they train, and a lot about Saskatchewan's contribution to Canada's military.  Oh, and it also showcased, for many years, Landscape as Muse, about the relationship between Canadian artists and Canadian land.  This is now running on Knowledge. 

If a subsidised communications network does not exist to show such material, where will it be shown?  Look at the once-vital Access Network in Alberta.  You can watch any amount of American garbage on it, but nothing about the history of Alberta, or cultural producers in Alberta or First Nations life.  Subsidy vs market is an old and tired argument, not worth revisiting one would think.  But it is an argument still current in provincial legislatures where they can give culture the chop with no warning, no foresight and no regret.  

Everett Baker. Gillie Thorarinson's Homes, 7 September 1950. Climax, Saskatchewan,

artists in small towns

Hill Strategies Research sends reports every so often on the status of the arts and artists in Canada: how many are there, where do they live, how much do they make.  Always the results are surprising and seem to confound general expectations. 

The study that came out today is about how many of our artists live in small and rural towns: as many as in Toronto and Montréal combined.  Vancouver, with the highest concentration of artists (2.35%) of the large cities, would rank only 21st among small municipalities.  Previous Hill Strategies studies have pointed out the sub-poverty income levels of Canadian artists, so this might have something to do with where they live.
47% of all Canada's artisans and craftspersons live in small towns, 35% of our visual artists do.  Cape Dorset is the centre of Inuit carving and printmaking.  West Bolton is in the Eastern Townships with 10% of its labour force in arts occupations.  Denman and Hornby Islands off the east coast of Vancouver Island have been intense centres of island crafts, arts and music since the 1960s.

Lou Lynn, of Monday's post, lives in Winlaw, BC in the quite remote Slocan Valley.  The work isn't all rural wood carving and fiddle music, it is as sophisticated as the work seen in urban centres.

Since the Massey Report of 1949-51, the arts have been seen as the way to confirm and support the development of an independent Canadian identity. It is surprising that so much of that identity is still investigated, and developed, in rural Canada.  

Tim Atherton

Prince Albert, SaskatchewanTim Atherton has contributed two photo-essays to On Site in the past: Edmonton's back lanes and fences in On Site 18: culture, and Prince Albert in On Site 19: streets.  He documents the small and insignificant which gain terrific power simply by being noticed and legitimised through collection.  The camera extricates its subject from the anonymity conferred on the ordinary.

The next issue of On Site will look at small things: micro-urbanism for example, rather than the 'master' plan, houses of less than 500 square feet. It has been a sobering year for hubris and grand designs; perhaps it is time to relearn how to cut our coat to fit the cloth.  Examples from the past abound: Prince Albert for example, overlooked because development pressure on it has been slight - new building happens on the highway leaving the downtown (above) intact.  This fine little building was, once, ordinary fabric with limited ambitions.  Did it ever need to be more? 

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Tim Atherton's blog is a lovely thing: photography and the things that influence it in the widest sense.  His entry on Sigfried Sasoon for Remembrance Day shows a fragment of Sasoon's Soldier's Declaration, his handwriting all defiant and firm.  Earlier on Atherton has a collection of photos taken at the Somme which as he points out would have been illegal if not suicidal.  A bomb explodes in front of the camera, razor wire photographed looks like some exotic cactus in sepia. 

Anyway, Tim Atherton doesn't send On Site anything anymore as his energy goes into this blog, which is actually a magazine in itself.  This raises a question: do we need magazines still?