At Confederation Landing Park in Charlottetown, a woman puts a pile of dirt back into a dump truck one bucket at a time.
Nearby on the Charlottetown waterfront, the sounds of dial tones, operator instructions and whale calls drift out from scattered radios.
These two exhibits at this year’s Art in the Open joined others that ranged from art in downtown shop windows to large fake tree-trunks in the former Mavor’s courtyard.
Three of the radios broadcasting operator instructions and ocean sounds overlook Peakes Quay as part of this year’s Art in the Open. – Michael Robar
Due to Saturday’s weather, some exhibits were moved or rescheduled, though most went forward as intended, including the giant crow puppet which replaced the March of the Crows, said Ghislaine Cormier, executive director of Fédération culturelle de l’ÎPÉ, which helps run the annual festival.
“It was the first time in 10 years, actually, that it rained for Art in the Open day, but you can’t win them all. That’s basically how we’re thinking about it.”
In Rochford Square, speakers were playing lullabies in over 40 languages. Titled Berceurs du temps, or Lulling Time, the exhibit featured a pop-up recording studio where people could add a recording of their own.
Dylan Goode went to Art in the Open to participate and decided to throw his voice into the mix.
“I sang a verse from You Are My Sunshine because it’s a pretty important one for me and my family.”
The song was one his mother used to sing to him and his sister, and he had little hesitation to record it.
“It’s something in the family, so why not share it?”
Guy Brun peels an onion as part of Valerie Salez’s Alone Together Together Alone, in which people perform the activity they did most in quarantine while isolating in painted rectangles at Victoria Park. Brun, who moved back to the Island during the coronavirus (COVID-19 strain) pandemic made plenty of soup while he self-isolated after arriving. – Michael Robar
Though less interactive, Norma Jean MacLean’s Work was plenty active, as the Island artist monotonously moved dirt for hours at the Confederation Landing Park.
“It’s about the processes of doing and undoing on a day-to-day level and highlighting that kind of cycle we go through every day with multiple tasks,” she said.
Inspired by her father, who used to drive a similar truck, MacLean sees Art in the Open as an opportunity to show people the potential art has to connect with their every-day lives.
“I hope they see how art can make a connection to the day-to-day using things that are quite common but not necessarily traditional artistic mediums.”
Artist Norma Jean MacLean shovels dirt into a plastic bucket as part of her art instillation in Confederation Landing Park. Titled Work, the performance art piece was meant to comment on the amount of work people do and undo every day. – Michael Robar
That aspect of Art in the Open, to engage with people who might not otherwise care, is part of what keeps bringing Dianne Campbell and Paul Wansbrough back every year.
“Art is an obscure type of thing and, like so many things, it’s all in the eye of the beholder,” said Wansbrough.
That obscurity makes it hard for some people to take it seriously, said Campbell, but Art in the Open can address it.
“It makes people appreciate the fact that art is, and could be more, important to them if they paid attention more.”
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.
