-
16. SHIP OF LIFE: Peter von Tiesenhausen
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
177 16 SHIP OF LIFE Peter von Tiesenhausen In Demmitt, a sawmill ghost town in northern Alberta where he grew up, Peter von Tiesenhausen builds pods, ships, towers, and any number of woven willow forms on site in the landscape. Before becoming an artist he worked as a laborer, miner, roughneck, and cat driver in the Klondike, Antarctica, and the oil fields in northern Canada. He lives off the land through his art, which often explores his relation to that same land. As he has stated: “I’m not trying to make a monument to anything. I want to have a dialogue with the land.” Ship (in field of timothy) (1993), a willow boat structure, references the journey his ancestors made to arrive in the New World. Ephemeral, like so many of the works von Tiesenhausen creates, it suggests the theme of a passage or journey through life. During a stay at the Banff Center for the Arts’ Leighton Colony, von Tiesenhausen actually carved a boat out of ice, set a rock into it and sent it on a journey floating down the Bow River. When the work eventually melted at some point on the river, the rock dropped unseen into the river’s depths. When an oil company asked to run a pipeline through his land he refused a lucrative buy-out offer. To preserve his land for future generations, von Tiesenhausen had to claim the land as an artwork through the use of the copyright act. The oil company subsequently abandoned trying to get their pipeline to cross his land. Lifeline (1990– ) is a lifelong work that began with the arbitrary placing of an eight-foot section of picket fence at a point easily visible from the artist’s studio. Each year an additional eight-foot section will be added to this fence structure until von Tiesenhausen’s death. As the project evolves, sections will decay as others are added. One of his most recent projects, called Figure Journey, involved touring a collectivity of carved larger-than-life figural sculptures . The Watchers, as the five sculptures have come to be known, have traveled thirty to thirty-five thousand kilometers through every province and territory of Canada, and have even gone by boat through the Arctic’s North- Ship of Life 178 west Passage. They have stood at the edge of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. The sculpture’s journey established a dialogue as people in logging towns, restaurants, gas stations, in cities or the country, reacted to the figures in various ways. While that journey ended at the same point where it began nearly five years later in Demmitt, Alberta, The Watchers have now been cast in iron at a foundry in the city of Hamilton and will be permanently installed in front of Olympia and York’s new building on Queen St. in Toronto. JG Peter, could you tell me what got you into making art? PvT I’ve always been painting and looking around, excited by art, and it was only at thirty that I had the opportunity to finally do that fulltime. I didn’t know what it meant to be an artist. I thought I would give it a go anyway. I started with what I knew, which was the land and landscape painting. I loved to paint and I just responded to what I saw around me. JG When you studied painting (1979–81) it was at the Alberta College of Art and you left there without graduating. It was ten years later that you began your first environmental site-specific project Lifeline on a fifty-acre field in northern Alberta. This is an ongoing project that will last your lifetime. It involves building, the scale of the land, demarcation, growth, and decay. Can you tell me something about the project? PvT That was the first thing that I did that was at all successful. It was just after working in the gold mines, and in Antarctica. I was embarking on a different life, setting to rest the previous one. I built a section of fence to mark that time, and will add an eight-foot section each year for the rest of my life, never again painting or repairing the previous sections. JG Your recent painting seems increasingly to draw from your sculpture. The forms are quite resolved in the images you make on wood and paper and even resemble primitive cave drawing. The symbolic presence is there in...