Sculpter Billy Gauthier will spend seven days carving a massive whale skull at Durdle’s Hardware in Bonavista before the sculpture is moved to the Quinton Premises in Red Cliff. (Jennie Williams/Facebook)
The Bonavista Biennale, a world-class public art event filled with immersive and sometimes challenging art, is back across the Bonavista Peninsula.
The event is held every second year and features contemporary art works displayed and performed over a 165 kilometre-long area.
This year’s theme is “host,” and participating artists were invited to interpret that theme however they wished.
Ryan Rice, one of the co-curators of the event, says it was inspired by the tourism industry in the region, but also the landscape itself.
“Visiting Bonavista and the peninsula, thinking about why people come here, what people do and how they interact. And reverting back to the original host, which is the land and water and building from there,” he said.
The biennale started with Lindsay Katsitsakaste Delaronde’s Sturgeon Woman Rising, a performance piece which takes part in the water and on land on Sandy Cove Beach in Elliston. (Marina Glassford/Facebook)
Rice said one of the interesting features of the region is the interplay between history and hospitality, pointing out that many historic locations and structures are being maintained by the hospitality industry as bed and breakfasts or attractions.
“We’re thinking about the resources, thinking about histories, thinking about our relations to land and water… and actually thinking about hospitality,” he said.
A host on the coast
Biennale executive director Sue Balint says there are 23 art projects that are part of this year’s festival and there are different ways to experience it all.
“Some people plan their trip, right? Their journey around the peninsula. Other people happen upon an individual work out in the natural landscape and say ‘what’s going on here?’ and then they go, ‘oh, there’s a thing called the biennale and there are more projects underway.”
Things kicked off Saturday with Sturgeon Woman Rising, an art piece in Elliston by Lindsay Katsitsakaste Delaronde, a Kanienke’haka artist and performer from Kahnawà:ke, near Montreal.
Inuk artist Billy Gauthier is also featured at the event. He was commissioned by the biennale to produce a new sculpture.
For Gauthier, the theme of host began as a broad one, so he had to narrow it down and decide what he wanted to represent, but he became inspired by his subject.
“The ultimate host is, of course, the Earth,” says Gauthier.
“She’s the host for all of us, for every single bit of life on this planet. So she’s what we need to take care of, you know? Mother Earth is incredibly, incredibly important. And there’s nothing bigger, nothing more worth protecting.”
Artist Miya Turnbull will present an installation of sculpture, video and photography at the Lester-Garland House in Trinity. (Miya Turnbull/Facebook)
Gauthier will be carving into a massive fin whale skull over the course of seven days, a creative marathon he says is unlike anything he’s attempted.
“This is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
“Well, at least next to, as some people might know, a hunger strike that myself and a couple of others went on a few years ago.”
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.
