Plans for an art feature at the centre of the Rockland Road and Highway 19A roundabout are on hold, and a new design evaluation process will be launched in consultation with the local arts community, after a decision by city council.
The roundabout feature was planned as the cherry-on-top of the city’s three-year Highway 19A upgrade project, now otherwise complete.
In August 2019, four feature concepts designed by McElhanney landscape architects were shortlisted by city council. The city then asked residents to weigh-in on them and received 1,300 votes. Among the designs, a “Tide Pool” concept received the most votes and was selected as the winning theme in March 2020.
But some members of Campbell River’s arts community were frustrated by not being involved in this process. Because of this, Ken Blackburn, Campbell River Arts Council executive director, with support from other community representatives, requested in an Aug. 20 letter to council that the process be put on hold.
The “Tide Pool” design is “pedestrian, bland, weakly composed and absolutely not representative of the thriving arts community of Campbell River,” said Blackburn, in the letter. “It is a poorly thought through engineering add-on.”
In response, Campbell River city council voted on Oct. 18 to put the plans on hold. The motion also directed staff to engage with the Arts Council in a new design process.
Coun. Kermit Dahl said during the meeting he supports putting the project on hold given current economic hardships faced by businesses, families and individuals — a view echoed by Councillors Ron Kerr and Sean Smyth.
“I don’t think this is the appropriate time to be spending large sums of money on something that might look pretty in the middle of the highway,” said Dahl.
But Coun. Colleen Evans, who proposed the motion, said its purpose is to put the funds on hold to allow for a more engaged design process, rather than shelving the project indefinitely and redistributing the funds to other projects.
“To basically exclude the arts community from being engaged in something that could become significant for Campbell River, I think is a missed opportunity,” said Evans.
Coun. Charlie Cornfield said he would stand by city council’s original decision in favour of McElhenney’s design.
“I don’t know why council keeps on reconsidering motions because we get a little bit of flack,” he said.
The decision to restart the process will cost the city time and money, added Cornfield.
City council’s decision to restart the process was welcomed news, said Blackburn, in an interview.
“I think it’s just respectful to the arts community to acknowledge that what we were getting wasn’t really representative of the arts community here,” he said.
The Arts Council hopes to engage with other representatives of the local arts community, including the art gallery, museum, Patrons of the Arts and local First Nations.
“I’d really like to encourage collaboration, with artist teams or even cross-cultural collaboration, but that’s just my own preference,” said Blackburn. “The ambition is that we will have a piece that represents the culture of this community.”
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.
