Langley Centennial Museum is back with its long-running annual exhibition, this time with a new name but still filled with unique green creations.
Through the Green Art: Sharing Sustainable Approaches and Practices Demonstrations and Discussion, the museum will celebrate Earth Day and encourage people to stay creative while keeping Mother Nature in mind.
The month-long exhibit started on Saturday, April 16, and the museum will invite various artists every Saturday until May 21 to showcase art made of natural and reused materials.
On April 23, for instance, visitors would be able to see artist Julia Zinovjeva create fabric colours using materials such as leaves, flowers, and food waste.
Zinovjeva will demonstrate her art for two hours, making a variety of colours. On the same day, at 2 p.m., Nadine Flagel will take the stage to teach visitors how to repurpose textiles to create hangings, floor pieces, and other home decorations.
Explaining the inspiration behind running the month-long exhibition, Lindsay Foreman, curator of Indigenous arts and culture for the museum, said it is essential to learn not to create more waste during the art process.
“It is just a way to make people think about consumerism and how you can use less or make use of things that come to your home and workplace,” she added.
Foreman encouraged people to be creative when out in nature.
She shared that many people paint river rocks and later take them back to forests.
“Giving a boost to creativity is important, but we also need to be mindful consumers,” Foreman said. “And these demonstrations are just the right ways to engage people in the different types of sustainable art practises.”
These exhibitions first started in 2013 and were held in different locations.
This is Langley Centennial Museum’s second time hosting the event at its Fort Langley location. Until last year, the event was called the Art of Upcycling.
Other upcoming exhibitions part of the Green Art initiative include:
The Mend Series with Sylvie Roussel-Janssens on Saturday, April 30
Sylvie creates artworks from found rigid plastics and twine. This mending and repair process is expected to encourage people to work together to repurpose materials and fix a “broken world.”
Hand tool woodworking and natural stains/finishes with Laurel Dahill on Saturday, May 14
Laurel uses hand tools to reclaim wood and create new works. Visitors can learn about the process of mixing and applying natural stains and finishes, eliminating the chemicals, plastics, and oils used in traditional stains and finishes.
Eco printing with the Garden Gals on Saturday, May 21
Visitors can learn about the process of eco-printing from New Westminster’s Garden Gals. These dedicated artists and horticulturalists will share how to use local leaves and flowers to make prints on rag paper.
The closing day will also have an artist panel discussion on sustainable approaches and practices to create artworks. The museum will also distribute sustainability art kits on a first-come-first-serve basis to youth and children visiting the museum.
Registrations are not required to attend the exhibitions and the panel discussion. Each event starts at 11 a.m., except the closing day exhibition, which starts at 10 a.m.
Langley Centennial Museum is located at 9135 King St. in Fort Langley. For more information, people can visit the museum’s website museum.tol.ca.
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.
