Interview with Michael Belmore about his exhibition Enbankment at Station Gallery
Candid interview (transcript below) with Indigenous artist Michael Belmore during this exhibition "Embankment" at Station Gallery, Whitby Ontario. Embankment (February 28 - April 12, 2009) was fabricated from the raw materials of the rail line of his where he was raised (Northern Ontario between Thunder Bay and Sioux Lookout) such as hammered copper, cast iron ore and carved river rock.
Since completing his training at the Ontario College of Art, Michael Belmore began exploring sculpture and Installation using raw materials such as copper, rock and wood. His process is very labour intensive, chipping and grinding rock by hand and hammering copper sheets to shape them.
Michael Belmore’s work often consider ideas about the land, sea and air where the elements meet. His work also reflects ideas of human impact on the earth and the way we alter landscapes.
Transcript (with slight modifications for clarity)
For the exhibition here I presented two main bodies of work. One is the carved stone work with either the copper, silver or gold leaf. That series relates to water, through fitting rocks together so that they like foam on water. It was the original process that I was working towards.
And the other pieces in the show, which are similar to this piece here, which is Gather, are works that deal with hammered copper. So I take an 1/8 inch copper plate and I hammer it. In a way that I usually take forms, map forms, things that deal with water and shorelines. And by informing the landscape or in this sense of mapping the landscape, I impact it both through calculated and miscalculated blows.
In the sense that these maps are quite accurate, but only up to the point where I start to get tired and through the process of being tired I make subtle mistakes, even some great mistakes where I will drop a hammer onto the surface which will cause damage.
It is a reflection of how we have dealt with the landscape of North America, our shorelines. How we impact our landscape. It's not necessarily through malice, sometimes it's just through experience. So we have to go through the process of learning and we are always constantly learning, usually from our mistakes.
A lot of his work deals with that. For me it's about that personal expression, where I actually am that individual. So these things are done by hand, and it's a long arduous process. I can relate that to… also how I was doing a piece and a lot of my work has to do with water, and the influence between where the shore, where the water meets the land.
It is very much like a wave action. You know, there's a certain consistency to waves when they hit the shore line, and for me the handling process is very much like that. Where it is this repetitive process and it works very well but every so often there is a subtle change. Sort of like you are walking on the beach and you have that waterflow in and out from the shoreline, and you think you have it, you think you understand it and then all of a sudden one wave will come in and you'll get soaked. You know, you get both of your shoes wet. It is that experience where we think we understand something and then all sudden, there in nature, there's a change.
And so, a lot of my work has to do with those subtle reflections, and for me that’s an important starting point to the work. A lot of the work is very simple in its approach but in that simplicity you can offer, or get into the work more, and there's more details available. I don’t require for everybody to understand all the little nuances that are put into the material or into the processes. If people just appreciate them for their aesthetic value, I am happy with that.
I mean for myself, these works are originally to deal with… the first piece I did, it dealt with the Yukon and the North and resource extraction. While I was in awe with, when I was up there in the Yukon, this landscape that was so pristine and so gorgeous, the colours, the textures. And beneath that surface, as an artist, as a person who works with materials, I understand where my materials come from, it is from that state.
So in sitting up there, I could actually look at the mountains and you could see that this mountain would have this much coal, this mountain has that much steel, this mountain has this much copper. There's an expression of the value of the commodity that comes from that rich resource and so I wanted to create these pieces that sort of discussed that idea.
Where there is this beautiful surface that people can get lost in. But beneath that surface, beneath these surfaces is resource, is materials. Things that come from that wilderness and are extracted, processed, and we utilize them. All the materials that we use in our daily lives come from the land. And so that’s what the expression behind these works are. In a very simplistic way but it's actually not terribly simplistic if you think about it. So that's where a lot of work comes from.
For this exhibition itself is very much about my grandparents and returning home, about three years ago now, I was able to see where they came from and see the changes. So it was a small trading community it used to be a sawmill town which basically is all gone now. The only two things that are really left standing are the embankment, which the train used to travel on and they've actually torn up the tracks so all the railway ties, the rails are gone. All the houses of the community are pretty much gone now, as well as the docks. It was very much a fishing community as well. It was where my grandparents lived, it was their trapline. So they grew up in the wilderness, or close to civilization in the wintertime, that was where the summer house was. And so it was an interesting experience to see that and also to see the embankment and the hydro poles, the telegraph poles were still there and they're still standing. It was interesting wheb these polls had returned to nature because they were no longer separated from the wilderness, the wilderness had encroached around them.
So you can sort of see these trees, or these sentinels in a sense, these objects that were guardians for us, to carry our communications which allowed us to go into wilderness and to be still connected to the rest of the world.
Where they are now standing without wires in the forest and it's sort of… I've always had this appreciation for telephone poles and hydro poles just because, in a sense that they've lived a full life, that they were these trees that had lived and had essentially been delimbed, derouted, and debarked and preserved and then basically brought back out and situated next to the forest. And this is an interesting experience where you know it's preserved and it stands there as part of us. It's a stand in for us, as far as how we encroached on nature but at the same time having something get left behind.
There is a series of drawings in this exhibition, Wireless, and not in the sense of urbanness, where you think about wireless, as being free of wires. It's being free of wires, but it is being left. It is being isolated. While we think of it as being freed up. Sort of wanting to deal with those ideas and these issues.