Small Work, Big Ideas: YUKON

Late night after rain, North Klondike River valley, Tombstone Mountains, Yukon

A sliver of blue braves the milky white cloud-sky this morning, giving me hope as I unfold myself into the wet world outside my tent.  Day after day delivers rain in these Yukon mountains and a nearly sun-filled pause in the low dome of moisture leaves me grinning.  I can cling to blue and its possibilities. 

The bluest blue.  I live for these days!!!

 I didn’t know I’d be spending the whole summer in northern Canada.  It’s become late August.  I am pioneering an artist in residence program at Tombstone Territorial Park, camping and working with the park’s Interpretive Centre on arts/ecology education while also tending the fires of my own creativity.  I’m exploring the land as much as possible, smitten by a revolving presentation of rainbows and ethereal twilight as we move deeply into fall. 

Rainbow and oncoming storm near North Fork Pass, Tombstone Mountains, Yukon

Beneath the daily flow of art and teaching I'm privately trying wrap my head/heart around the sense of raw wilderness that – delightfully and astonishingly – surrounds me here.  It is truly awesome, in the same way that glaciers and icebergs were for me in Greenland.   I am small here, surrounded by dreams as fast and wide as the waterways that cleave these moss-covered hills.  And I am learning to let the earth cradle me when it feels like nothing else can or will.

"Drunken Spruce / Forest Family", acrylic on tree-free paper

Tundra Raven, Olgilvie Mountains, Yukon.  Mixed media on tree-free paper.

 I’ve stumbled upon what I call a last place, an ecosystem still incredibly undisturbed.  We have no reference point for this in the South - the lower 48 - and I understand how fragmented everything has become. Wilderness like this takes your breath away, leaving you mute and grasping for a tether to guide you home across the tracks of moose, caribou, grizzly and wolf.

Caribou antlers fall where they may in Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon.

I haven’t had much online access here this last month.  We are solar powered and off grid at the visitor center where I work.  I’m finally returning to social media and this blog, overwhelmed with how to begin and what to say of my current experience in the north.  I know that photographs are a great place to start, though they reveal only the surface rather than the soul of these cloud-topped mountains, spruce forest, and sub-arctic tundra.  

"Small home / big big world", mixed media on watercolor paper

Artist’s residencies are one part making/creating and one part looking and seeing.  I'm constantly alert as if I’m scanning for grizzly on the horizon.  Right now my days are heavily weighted to accommodate a growing cache of impressions to be doled out slowly in the coming months.  I am the alpine pika stockpiling food for winter.  My voluminous notes, research and outdoor adventures in the Territory are crucial sustenance to carry me forward.  Creating art from raw experience, distilling wonder into something articulate and palatable while capturing the ephemeral - it takes time.

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"Ravens over the Continental Divide", Tombstone Mountains, Yukon.  Mixed media on watercolor paper.

Yukon!! -- Boreal Forest Art and Ecology

Local art adorns the hardwood forest of birch and poplar outside Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

 Greetings from the land of the midnight sun!!  I've traveled North again and this time I'm writing from an artist's residency at the Klondike Institute of Art in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, CANADA.  I'm thrilled to be here.

My initial draw to the Yukon was to continue investigating the tally on wild lands in the North as our planet continues to warm up and get crowded.  I also want to know what "big wild" really feels like, and to (re)consider the notion of Last Places that I began with in Arctic Greenland.  Does undeveloped, non-industrialized land exist in any meaningful context in this world now and what does it look like beyond a remnant of a romantic ideal? 

I'm happy to say that from my ground level post here in the northwest corner of Canada, the land appears to be doing well.  My immediate sense is this: earth as utterly staggering in scope and impossibly vast.  I'm aware there's much more to the story than this, but for now I think, take it and run with it.

"Thaw" -- Mixed media on tree-free paper by Rebecca Barfoot.

There's also a secondary and more personal magnetism that drew me to northern Canada: I've been obsessed with trees since I traveled to Greenland.  They've worked their way into my paintings, sculpture, and into my earth-bound, starlit  imagination. There are no trees in Greenland - and it occurs to me that perhaps I've fallen in love with absence.   

"Mother/Bear Boreal" -- Cyanotype with mixed media by Rebecca Barfoot.

The Yukon is dominated by boreal forest, the largest terrestrial biome on Earth.  Known at taiga across Russia, it's the green halo of northern woodland that girdles our globe just south of the Arctic tundra, serving as Earth's "cooler" and regulating temperatures worldwide. 

Here around Dawson, the boreal consists largely of paper birch, black and white spruce, balsam poplar and aspen.  A walk in the woods for me, on a more intimate level, is to feel cradled, sheltered, and supported.  One of the more subtle and nuanced interests I have as an artist concerns the internal  landscape - both personal and collective - and how it reflects the state of our natural environment.  I am beginning to explore the mirroring of inner/outer landscapes in my work.

Deep Forest -- Mixed media on tree-free paper by Rebecca Barfoot.

Beyond the poetry of trees in form/metaphor is my growing awareness of the biological imperative of the forest in function. Large volumes of boreal woodland are logged for paper pulp (cardboard boxes, magazines, catalogs, paper towels etc), oil and gas extraction (Alberta tar sands...), mining and general money-making.  But destroy the forest and you eliminate the planet's most effective method of uptaking (via photosynthesis) and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide (in both living and dead plant matter).

One of the byproducts of our shifting climate is the phenomenon of  "drunken" trees in the boreal, tilted and falling as the permafrost thaws beneath them.  Earlier this month I noticed stretches of lurching stumbling tumbling black spruce (picea mariana) on the 330 mile stretch of road between Whitehorse and Dawson.  It's terribly wrong - and oddly beautiful.

New pond-scape created from melting permafrost, Alaska Range -- Photo Credit: Michael S Quinton

"Drunken" Black Spruce, Yukon.

"Tilt", Yukon Territory, Canada.  Mixed media on cyanotype by Rebecca Barfoot. 

More soon, with love from the North,  Rebecca @ www.rebeccabarfoot.com
...like action rising out of stillness, all wings and quiet thunder.  -R.Barfoot, May 2014