With Tree Snag, Douglas Coupland reflects a day beachcombing in Haida Gwaii with his friend, the late Gordon Smith
Coupland shares the back story of the dramatic new large-scale public artwork at Grosvenor Ambleside in West Vancouver
Douglas Coupland got the idea for the new Tree Snag from a piece of driftwood that Gordon Smith had on his back patio for decades.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, West Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist Douglas Coupland and his dear friend, the late legendary Modernist painter and sculptor Gordon Smith, spent a day beachcombing on a remote, pristine beach in Haida Gwaii. Coupland describes it as the best day ever.
He has immortalized that unforgettable experience through a series of public artworks in their home town.
The newest piece, Tree Snag, is 30 feet tall and nearly 30 feet wide, weighs approximately 16,000 pounds, and consists of fibreglass and resin over a driftwood-texture surface covered in aerospace-grade platinum paint.
It joins three other artworks around the Grosvenor Ambleside property in West Vancouver: Float Stack (2018), Whale Vertebra (2018), and Deer Vertebra (2020).
When Grosvenor approached Coupland for its public art project, he knew he wanted to reflect the spirit of that day. Smith himself called it one of the highlights of his life.
Coupland first met Smith and his wife, Marion, at a dinner party hosted by Arthur Erickson for Adrienne Clarkson and John Saul. He and Smith became fast friends, sharing a love of art, ideas, their shared hometown of West Vancouver, and beachcombing.
In August 2005, the two chartered a boat in Haida Gwaii and travelled from Queen Charlotte to an untouched beach on the west coast of Graham Island (Haida Gwaii’s northern island). There, they found all sorts of objects like floats that had washed ashore from afar and so many natural treasures; it was like “the world’s biggest Easter egg hunt”, Coupland recalls.
“The beach soaks up all of your central and peripheral vision and as you start looking, it shuts off the noisy part of your brain,” Coupland tells Stir. “It gives you an incredible sense of both peace and adventure.”
The majesty of Haida Gwaii stays with him. It’s remarkable in so many ways, he says.
“Most people don’t know, for instance, that most of it was untouched by the ice ages,” says Coupland, an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres who has exhibited work all over the globe and was Google’s 2015 artist in residence at the Paris Google Cultural Centre. “On the West Coast there are remarkable volcanic finger-like features that were obliterated elsewhere in North America. I could go on and on, but it’s almost shocking how special a place it is.
“The beach we visited is close to QC but quite hostile to visitors,” he says. “You need to have the weather, the light, the tides, and the swells, and even then, you have a tiny time window to squeak in and out. We chose it specifically because of this… Gordon wanted to see untampered-with tidal pools and I wanted to see what pristine nature looks like when it’s not screwed up by people. This trip led to the show that ultimately ended up in the Aquarium in 2018.” (Vortex was a year-long installation in collaboration with Ocean Wise and highlighted the escalating global conservation crisis of ocean plastic pollution.)
The inspiration for this new work in fact first came from a visit to the Erickson-designed home of Smith, who was member of the Order of Canada and founder of the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation for Young Artists.
“The Tree Snag is based on a snag that had been on Gordon and Marion’s back patio since the 1970s, which meant that it had no salt left in it,” Coupland says. “It was about five feet high, and Brent Comber allowed me to dry it out in his wood kiln and he said we got six buckets of water out of it. I coated this dried out piece with resins, sanded it, and coated it with white enamel. It appeared as part of a larger installation in my 2014 show at the VAG that then went to the ROM in Ontario [everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything].
“And for this [new] piece,” he says, “I carved out a slot through which people can walk that takes them out of one world and places them into another.”
Grosvenor commissioned Coupland to create the Ambleside artworks to transform the waterfront community’s vision as a gathering place for art and culture. Tree Snag, which is located mid-block on Bellevue Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets next to Ancora Waterfront Patio and Dining, is one of the largest pieces of public art in Greater Vancouver.
On the west coast of Haida Gwaii’s Graham Island are volcanic finger-like features that were obliterated elsewhere in North America. Photo by Douglas Coupland
Related Articles
