Every month, we feature a new take on the CBC Arts logo created by a Canadian artist. Check out our previous logos!
Birdmouse is the pseudonym of Jason “Lenny” Gallant, an East Coast artist who likes to describe himself as a reclamist.
“I know reclamist is not a real word,” Gallant writes, “but I use it anyway.” And as for what that means, think of his practice as a kind of upcycling. The artist typically works with salvaged wood, harvesting second-hand timber from whatever he can get his mitts on. “[I’ve] dissected 50 organs over the past nine years,” he says. (Pump organs, that is.) And he reworks that material into everything from murals to coffee tables.
“Using reclaimed materials also means using the skills and expertise of the previous creator,” Gallant writes. “I often describe this scenario as having an army of dead people working for me, as most of the items I reclaim already have 75-100 years of use before they come to me. I try to balance the notions of historical relevance, sentimental burdens and the freedom of working with something that has been discarded.” And Gallant has a very personal connection to the piece he made for us — a little story he reveals in this questionnaire.
A closer look … (Birdmouse)
Name: Jason “Lenny” Gallant Age: 45 Homebase: Bethel, P.E.I.
What’s the story behind your name, Birdmouse?
We had a cat toy that was part bird and part mouse. The name does not have any more meaning than that. But it does allow me to try new ideas and mediums without having to adhere to a named outcome. And it’s weird. And that’s important to me.
How long have you been making art with wood?
I’ve been doing this work full-time since 2012.
What drew you to the practice?
Free time. Due to life circumstances I had many months where I was unable to work my job in logistics at a solar company. I wanted to make my career be what I naturally started doing in my free time. That turned into creating art from back-alley treasures. That was in Edmonton. Still loving it!
Birdmouse. Shattered Rising. (www.birdmouse.ca)
Let’s talk about your design! What inspired the concept?
The scene is a nod to my time “out west” where this ride all started. It’s where I lived in my 20s and early 30s, and where I met my wife. I went on numerous hiking trips in the mountains, something I definitely miss.
Is the wood in this piece salvaged? Any significance to where it came from?
The wood used is from the dining table my family ate around when I was a child. It brings up memories of boiled dinners, lobster feasts and homework! And of course the CBC was always on the radio or TV growing up.
What’s the project you’re most proud of?
My first solo art show was called Cost Of Living. Each artwork was inspired by and priced in correspondence to a monthly bill or expense. It allowed the audience to see what and how much work I needed to complete and sell every month in order to just get by — a peek into the life of a working rural artist. I compared Alberta and P.E.I. expenses, having works representing the same bills with different values and subject matters.
A Birdmouse mural in Montague, P.E.I. (www.birdmouse.ca)
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.
