Combining nature, art and science came to fruition with a collaborative stick weaving project today.
At the How To Draw A Tree Wellness Circle on Johnston Green at the University of Guelph, people were welcomed to join artists Dawn Matheson and Agnes Niewiadomski to create a sculpture made out of sticks.
Trees saved Matheson’s life. She has her own challenges with mental health but being with trees in nature relaxes her and calms her mind.
“It’s just a practice I’ve developed. It grounds me,” she said.
She wanted to bring a bit about what fuels her creativity and helps her mental health to the public with this art project.
The process of the sculpture will continue to unravel in the next couple of weeks as people add sticks to it. About 50 people came out to the event on Wednesday.
Eventually the sculpture will be used as a set piece for a play put on by Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute (GCVI) students.
“Our idea is always like, challenge yourself to try something that you’re not used to,” said Gerard Gouchro, teacher and minor head of arts at GCVI. Students came to help create pieces of art as part of the sculpture.
The project stemmed from an idea to get people engaged with the wellness circle. An art project called How To Draw A Tree was created by Matheson four years ago. Although the project is finished she hopes people will still engage with it.
The team behind the project is a mix of artists, sound composers, students, poets, ecopsychologists and more. They created sound walks. People can go through a guided tour in the Arboretum while listening to artists talk about their relationship to trees.
There are four guided sound walks onsite and each person has a tree planted at the wellness circle that they connected with while working on the project.
The stick sculpture will be a work in progress. There will be a sign that reads anyone is welcome to add a stick to the sculpture. “It’ll become a true process based community sculpture, maybe it’ll get destroyed, which is fine by me. I’m a process based artist, there’s no final product,” said Matheson.
Most of the materials used for stick weaving are sticks from trees in the Arboretum that were pruned in the winter. Instead of the material being put into a chipper “this was a great opportunity to share it here for this project,” said Justine Richardson, director of the Arboretum.
Matheson hoped with minimal instruction people felt free to add sticks to the sculpture wherever they saw fit.
“It’s just kind of come alive to see everyone’s contributions. I’m really impressed,” said Niewiadomski.
Trees are the ultimate improvisers; they move wherever the sun is, said Matheson. Trees are good listeners and you can’t experience a lot of rejection from them.
“There’s two parallel crises that are the biggest crisis in the world right now. And that’s mental illness and climate crisis,” she said. This is what the project is about.
There will be researchers from the U of G who will be studying the art project and will give feedback to see how beneficial creating a connection between people and the earth is.
The question that runs through Matheson’s mind is; how do we glean life and creativity from trees but also give back to nature?
The art piece will be up for the next couple of weeks on Johnston Green and people can contribute by adding in their own sticks.
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.
