Gordon Halloran, the restless visionary who made Roberts Creek his home since 1992 while earning international acclaim for his monumental installations, filmmaking, stage productions, photography and painting, has died.
Halloran passed away on May 31 aged 78, nine months after a cancer diagnosis and surgery that took place the day before his 41st wedding anniversary.
During a career shaped by auspicious accomplishments — in 2006 he was appointed as Canada’s official representative to the Cultural Olympiad that accompanied the Winter Games in Turin, Italy — he was simultaneously a stalwart contributor to the artistic landscape of his adoptive home on the Sunshine Coast. In 1992, he directed a full-scale production of the musical Fiddler on the Roof at the newly opened Raven’s Cry Theatre.
The show led to a half-dozen theatrical collaborations with his wife, author and playwright Caitlin Hicks. The pair toured originals like Six Palm Trees up and down the Coast. He served as director and dramaturge for Hicks’s work Singing the Bones, which premiered in 1993 and toured extensively in Canada, California, and the U.K.
Meanwhile, he was establishing a name for himself in a novel artistic medium linked to the skating rinks of his Ontario youth in Trenton and Niagara. His ice painting concept was sparked when playing pickup hockey at Vancouver’s Britannia Community Centre (a lifelong sportsman, Halloran was also a prizewinning tennis player).
“To take over that rink and make a huge abstract painting out of it would be kind of a subversive act,” Halloran told The Globe and Mail. He took years to refine the laborious process of adding pigment to frozen three-dimensional surfaces.
Members of his own community became collaborators. In 2003, he created the Ice Painting Challenge, which challenged ten ten-member teams to create an ice painting in the Sechelt area on New Year’s Eve. The teams, including delegations from Sechelt and Gibsons, then interpreted their works through music, dance, song, drumming, and poetry. When the presentations concluded, participants laced up skates and played a game of hockey atop the artwork.
Halloran’s Paintings Below Zero filled a church in Italy. In Chicago, 176,000 people came to see his two-storey wall of ice that was 60 meters in length (Mayor Richard Daly gave a speech at the Consular Ball that heralded its opening). Three hundred thousand viewed his refrigerated sculptures in Toronto. The 2010 Olympic Winter Games commissioned the Ice Gate installation for the Richmond Oval. Working in a cold storage facility at 28 degrees below zero, he created the work in 45-minute bursts while wearing a balaclava, goggles and gloves.
“Ice holds its form as long as it’s supported,” Halloran told the Coast Reporter in 2016. “That’s like our lives — we can hold on as long as we get support from our family, friends and community.”
Following his education at the Ontario School of Art, Halloran started his career as an illustrator. He created covers for publications like Macleans, the Financial Post, and American Airlines Magazine. His first solo art show came in 1979 at Toronto’s Nancy Poole Gallery. Through the 1980s, he gained a reputation for the life-like portraiture he exemplified in Hung Jury, a dozen life-size portraits. In 1986, he used mixed media, acrylic and pencil to create group portraits of traders in action at exchanges in Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver and New York.
His one-man play Showing Size was inspired by those meetings with maverick millionaire traders. “Full of humour and crack pot evangelistic fervour,” opined the Vancouver Sun arts critic Lloyd Dykk after seeing it staged. Halloran revived the work in 2023 for performances during the Sechelt Arts Festival.
A fascination with film — beginning as a production designer for the movie Clouds (which opened at New York’s Lincoln Centre in September 2000) — blossomed into directing his own productions. Singing the Bones debuted with a gala in Sechelt, as did his Body of Light. 2016’s Body of Light starred Gerardo Avila, Maggie Guzzi, Katherine Denham and Caitlin Hicks in a depiction of the power of creativity to navigate existential crises.
Halloran’s voracious artistic curiosity was fuelled by quiet, keen powers of observation. In 2007, he watched visitors in the sculpture-filled church in Turin. With each angle that they inspect, he said, “more is revealed in [their] life, which is the way art is to me — it’s a chance to see things you’ve never seen before.”
A screening of Halloran’s Body of Light will take place this summer at the Art and Words Festival in Gibsons.
