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

25 at 9,500' -- A Winter Artist's Residency

Breckenridge, Colorado.  9,500 feet above sea level. Deep snow angled against the studio, more white falling from the sky, a swirling winter wonderland.  I've made myself at home in the historic Tin Shop, which was bought and renovated by the town's well endowed Arts/Historic District and is now offered as a cozy guest artist's live/work space.  I was a resident here in 2009 and had the good fortune of being invited back for the month of February.  I am now in the midst of  25+ days to make all the art I can make - and I'm off and running!!

Winter in Breckenridge... snowy Wonderland!!!!

 As always, I've come bearing some notion of my intended projects, but I always allow myself to follow creative tangents as they arise.  It's a bit like tracking an animal through the forest on a winter's day, fun and then fruitless, hopeful and maddening!  Now on my ninth official artist's residency program, I've learned that this is the best time to explore brand new creative ideas and to allow myself to wander into uncharted territory with complete abandon. Since I work in a variety of different media, this can lead to some frantic overwhelm - along with sleepless nights - but I am going with it!!

"Lay Down Your Grief And Kiss The Ground" -- a mixed media piece I created for a traveling exhibit called 'Down the Rabbit Hole'... 

"Earth/Ice Listening" -- Studio installation in progress with encaustic wax, discarded paper towels, charcoal, xerox transfer and pencil drawing.

"Tea Series/Mindfulness" -- work in progress -- discarded tea/bags, Usnea, map, paper towel, beeswax, damar resin, box elder seeds, and ink on paper handmade from old lists, fliers, junk mail.

"Tulugaq/Raven of the North" -- ink, charcoal, and acrylic on tree-free paper

 Along with developing new projects, I've also finished a large commission piece for a buyer who shares my appreciation of raptors and other winged things: Tulugaq/Raven, whose range takes her into the Arctic.  I'm currently working on a second commissioned painting, Falling into Blue, which is a creative exploration of color, feeling, and possibility.  As a friend writes, "the breezy surface pulls you in... and then you fall into the mystery."  To me, blue is the essence of what I found in the very far north - rock and ice, sea and sky - and a reflection of the world that lives inside us all. 

"Northern Nightscape Ice-land Aurora Love", study #7, ink and acrylic on tree-free paper

A pile of my hand made paper in the Tin Shop.  Such pleasure in recycling my To-Do lists into creativity!!

 I'm exploring more ideas about Greenland and the Arctic; about land-earth-ice, climate-environment-ecology, human relationships and how the din of our lives can keep us from hearing feeling seeing knowing.  I also find myself creating simple works of art that are - essentially - a celebration of life and aliveness.  The beautiful miracle of it all, like a love letter to Greenland penciled around the girth of the planet.

I've also discovered a relationship between Breckenridge - this cute snowbound ski town in the high Rockies - and the Arctic: our climate delivers the possibilities of change more swiftly to those places that are either high up, or far up. Altitude vs. latitude.  Here the snow drives fast and hard, while at home in southwest Colorado, drought is the hallmark of the current winter season.  What next??

 For me, I've been invited to go North again this summer, to live and work in Canada's Yukon Territory at the Klondike Institute of Art.  May I discover there an untangled pathway to creating sculpture, installation, painted images, porcelain objects and word-craft that resonate with meaning and reach beyond me into the vastness.  As the poet Mary Oliver has written, "I want to be improbable amd beautiful and afraid of nothing, as if I had wings."  Onward. ~

Wings of Winter

Snow Bunting/Plectrophenax nivalis.  India ink and acrylic on paper.

Birds are in my heart these days, flapping mightily into metaphor and song with the deepening of winter. The more I tune into them - and the more they flutter around inside me - the more astonishing/magical I find them.  I've been watching raptors and juncos here in the canyon country of southern Utah, but also thinking about the birds of the far north and far south.  And I've been painting them. 
 

Arctic Tern/Sterna paradisaea.  India ink and acrylic on tree-free paper.

Arctic Tern.  Notorious for their epic migrations, these fleet birds breed in the Arctic and fly south every year to winter in Antarctica.  That's an annual round trip of over 40,000 miles!! I filmed them off the coast of Greenland and slept on an island where they were nesting.  They lay a clutch of eggs directly on the ground, and daddy bird helps incubate.

Albatross, EXALTED!!  India ink and acrylic on tree-free paper.

Albatross. At home on the Southern Ocean as far south as Antarctica, they've made headlines in recent years for turning up dead, en masse, their stomachs filled with the ubiquitous plastic waste that fills our seas. Nineteen of the 21 species of Albatross are endangered.  More inspired details: they can live for over 60 years, have the largest wingspan of any bird (up to 12 feet!) and can soar for hours - even days - without having to land.  Good news:  A banded Laysan Albatross of Midway Island in the North Pacific became a mom again at age 62!!

Snow Bunting, India ink and acrylic on tree-free paper. 

Snow Bunting.  Possibly the cutest of tiny Arctic songbirds, they are also known colloquially as "Snowflakes".  (And of course a group of them is called a drift.)  They brave a non-stop, 500 mile flight from mainland Europe to get to their high Arctic breeding grounds on the Svalbard archipelago.  Their voices were some of the first I heard when I arrived in Greenland. 

Raven, Canyonlands National Park.  India ink and acrylic on tree-free paper.

Raven.  I didn't see ravens while in Greenland, although this is actually part of their range.  Famously adaptable, intelligent and endearingly inquisitive!  Their cries fill the still desert air here in winter. They can be aggressive, but I've also watched them nuzzling and grooming each other in the ragged sunshine of December.  Iconic emblem of the Southwest, and perhaps the reason I'm now at work on a much larger commission featuring corvus corax.


The small miracle of flight: mesmerizing, poetic. How fragile we are, these birds/we humans - and how resilient. The struggle to survive and thrive is universal. 

Arctic Tern, India ink and acrylic on tree-free paper. 

"Descension. Ascension. The velocity of wings creates the whisper to awaken," writes Terry Tempest Williams. "Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy."

I am a woman with wings. 







  


All works by Rebecca Barfoot.
www.rebeccabarfoot.com