When customers enter the Dawson Creek Cannabis Company store to buy marijuana, some are stopped dead in their tracks by what looks like a full-sized, glowing coffin in the middle of the store.
Illuminated from within, it looks like a stained-glass casket.
“It raises eyebrows,” said Mattson in an interview with CBC News about creating art from afterbirth. “It makes a bit of a spark. Some people are totally disgusted and walk away, horrified. Some are amazed.”
Emilie Mattson with her son, artist Karl Mattson. (Matthew Rivard/Contributed)
Mattson said she was first inspired to use the unusual artistic medium during calving season at her ranch near Rolla, B.C., more than 20 years ago.
Helping to deliver a calf in her barn in bitterly cold weather, she slung the placenta over a light at the edge of the stall.
“We’re helping this cow because she’s having trouble, and I look over and with the light behind it, the placenta looks like stained glass,” she recalled.
At the time, Mattson was running 300 head of cattle and raising a family on the farm, but was already an artist working in paint and sculpture.
She soon began to experiment with adding preserved placenta to her repertoire. Preserved in a special brine, she says placenta dries like parchment or leather, preserving dramatic colours.
Emilie Mattson on her cattle ranch near Dawson Creek, B.C. (Donna Kane/Contributed)
Calving season gave her a plentiful supply. While she said her neighbours in ranch country were dismissive at first, they eventually started saving the placentas of their own animals and “brought them over in buckets” to top up her supplies.
Even the local veterinarian contributed, she said.
Mattson has since used placentas in many of her multimedia pieces.
For the coffin-shaped work she calls The Treasure Box, which took her two years to make, she stretched placenta across a metal frame that’s held up by a well worn chassis.
Now it’s been given pride of place in a cannabis dispensary a 20-minute drive from her ranch.
Dawson Creek Cannabis Company owner Matthew Rivard, who promotes local artists in his store, says Mattson’s artwork is “captivating, breathtaking, and with brilliant colours.”
Customers are curious about the ‘captivating’ art piece made from cow placenta, said cannabis store owner Matthew Rivard, who uses his Dawson Creek business to showcase work by local artists. (Matthew Rivard/Contributed )
He says the piece is eye-opening for locals who come in to buy a pre-rolled joint or THC gummies.
“You definitely see customers come in, people that are just getting off of work. Maybe they’re working down at the tire shop and they come in and they stop and they look at the piece and say, ‘Oh my God.’ Everybody has a reaction.
“They think it’s stained glass, and then they take a closer look. They see a little fleck of straw in the placenta. Some are like, ‘Oh yeah, I can see life and death.'”
Mattson’s art, including more conventional painting, has been exhibited in juried exhibitions for years.
Her art has been reviewed in publications as wide ranging as Beef in B.C. — a B.C. Cattlemen’s Association magazine — and the culture periodical Espace Sculpture.
“These brilliantly coloured afterbirths are both a symbol and a chore,” wrote art critic Paula Gustafson in Espace Sculpture in 2001, reviewing one of Mattson’s placenta pieces at the Artropolis 2001 show held at the CBC Vancouver studios.
“[They represent] … the miracle and mystery of birth and the sacred and violent act of labour.”
For Mattson, the placenta, which nourishes the baby in the womb, is “the beginning of everything.”
“It’s life sustaining. … If it wasn’t for the placenta, we wouldn’t exist,” she said.
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.
