Humans have been using art to connect to the natural world since the first cave paintings, but this month Nova Scotia artists are using their work to save a valuable piece of nature that’s in danger of disappearing.
Described by NSNT conservation project coordinator Allison Thorne as a “critical connector for wildlife,” the strip of land — including the connected lakes Long Lake, Cranberry Lake and Withrod Lake — stretches from the triangle of the Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes preserve between Bayers Lake, Timberlea and Kearney Lake to the wilds further inland across Hammonds Plains Road.
“The area has been identified for a really long time as being extremely important for Halifax, you can trace it back to a report made to the city in 1971,” says Thorne, encouraged by the community support from groups like the Ecology Action Centre, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Friends of Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes who’ve been drumming up public interest in the campaign.
“If you look at aerial imagery of the area, you can see how it’s really surrounded by development. … To have the area split at that point would really take away the ability for wildlife to move through there, and the canoe route would have houses on every side of the lake, and all that sort of thing.”
The land’s owners have agreed to sell it to the Nova Scotia Nature Trust at a reduced price, and have also made a sizeable in-kind donation to start the campaign, which runs until July with a $2.4 million goal.
That July deadline spurred Clayton Park-based painter Shelagh Duffett to organize WILD, encouraging nine other artists to display their nature-inspired work and contribute anywhere from 20 to 100 per cent of their proceeds to Save the Wild Blue.
Duffett’s connection to the site is a personal one. She grew up in Rockingham and frequently swam in nearby Susies and Quarry lakes, when the Bicentennial Highway was just two lanes and long before the existence of Bayers Lake Business Park, which meant a longer hike up logging roads to reach them.
She’s seen the area’s natural habitat for deer, foxes and hundreds of bird species whittled away by business and residential growth. Eventually, surrounding developments will cut off the Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes preserve if the connecting land isn’t preserved.
“It’s vitally important that we protect it, because the nature of the game is just development, development, development. It’ll just keep going,” says Duffett.
“There are areas that are still wild, but they’re privately owned, so you know at some point they’ll be developed if they’re not purchased or something happens to them. People want to live on lakes, it’s prime real estate.”
Shelagh Duffett’s Crow Chat, acrylic on birchwood.
Duffett’s concern was deepened by the clearcutting of the woods around the former site of the Mount Saint Vincent University motherhouse, which had been home to deer, foxes and the area’s famous murder of crows. One of her own paintings in the exhibition is titled As the Crow Flies, while another is Goodnight Susie, inspired by those idyllic swims in Susie Lake.
Other WILD artists include Danny Abriel, Mark Brennan, Kimberley Eddy, Melanie Fontaine, Gord MacDonald, Lori MacDonald, Timothy McGuire, Suzanne O’Callaghan, Anne-Marie Spears. Works range from MacDonald’s vivid landscapes to Fontaine’s lithograph-like cyanotypes of a tree’s rings.
“It’s a nice cross between science, nature and art,” says Thorne, who is an artist herself, working in metals and creating jewellery.
Thanks to word-of-mouth, some of the artwork has found buyers already, before the event begins with a noon-to-4 p.m. reception at Chase Gallery. Subconsciously, Duffett paraphrases singer-artist Joni Mitchell’s ecological anthem Big Yellow Taxi when she sums up why this campaign to save this vanishing habitat is so important.
“Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Boom, you can never, ever reclaim it. That’s why we want to put the brakes on development as much as we can for the Blue Mountain-Birch Lakes area.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
