It's difficult to talk about the work of artist Anna Hanson without talking about the art of her famous grandfather, the monumental sculptor, Dudley Carter.
"His spirit is always with us," she said.
Hanson, whose carving studio is on a mountain overlooking Roberts Creek, is well known in her own right. Even if you are unfamiliar with the name you've probably seen her work: the best known piece is the large, carved cedar sign by the highway that welcomes visitors to Sechelt. Another one of her carved wooden signs hangs over the front door of the SC Museum & Archives. She has lived in or near Gibsons since 1980, and at one time during those early years, almost every carved sign in town was her creation. They are distinctive in that hand tools are used and the natural wood is left to weather.She loves working on split cedar - when she carves the surface, the natural split cedar background creates a stimulating contrast. The work is textural, the image lifted out of the surrounding wood using various techniques and planes of light and shadow. No paint is used -neither is sandpaper.
"That's sacrilege," she said.
You might have seen her out on Highway 101 last week giving a face lift to the Sechelt welcome sign, making the wooden sun shine again and cleaning up the image of the heron in flight. She'll be using original hand tools that her grandfather once used in his long career.
"They're the best," she said running her hand over the durable steel from the '20s and '30s that has been adapted for carving use. She treasures the double headed axe, gauges, mallet, adze and round-edged two inch chisels, and acknowledges that her grandfather has crept into the conversation again, his presence manifest in his tools and in her choice of studio construction.
Hanson, her husband Lex and cousin Earl Carter, built the Northwest coast shelter house on their property that she now uses for a workshop. Dudley Carter grew up in First Nations communities, and in 1918 he lived on Haida Gwaii working as a forester and timbercruiser, the only white man there at the time. The monumental totem poles and longhouse construction influenced him greatly, and later, when his carving career began in the '30s, he built several of these houses in which the family lived.
Hanson's studio has a certain symmetry to it, much like a longhouse. Inside, the floor is dotted with thick cedar rounds over crushed gravel; it's a floor you never need to polish. The antique table is hand hewn by Carter without a single nail used in its construction. On a plain wooden work bench, Hanson hand carves cedar bowls-that is, when she has time. Her past six months have been preoccupied with a gigantic project that is also part of the family history.In 1947, a shopping plaza in Bellevue, Wash., commissioned Carter to create a work of public art, Bird Reaching for the Morning -an unusual expenditure for the time. They also planted a tree, a Mediterranean variety of cedar, and this tree became a focal point for the mall. Recently, when the plaza expanded, they were forced to cut down the tree and decided to carry on the tradition of public art by finding a carver who could shape the wood. They tracked down Carter's granddaughter and the wood was trucked to Roberts Creek where Hanson spent six months in an outdoor workshop (it wouldn't fit in her studio), from January to June, carving the nine metre tree, a trunk and giant limb, into a new sculpture that also depicted birds. The work is called Full Circle and now surrounds a tall fireplace in the mall's centre. Hanson learned much from her grandfather about bold design principles, apprenticing with him until he died at the age of 101. During her early years, she studied marble and bronze sculpture and took training at Emily Carr College of art and a BA in fine arts at the University of British Columbia. Finally, she returned to wood as her medium.
Although there are many projects on her plate, the District of Sechelt has accepted her proposal for an original artwork to be displayed in a park by the municipal building in 2009. Hanson is excited by this project because it will incorporate aluminum along with her traditional choice, western red cedar. The basic design is of a large copper shield such as were once used in early days by First Nations on the West Coast. The design also reminds the viewer of a sail hoisted high on an aluminum mast. On the lower hanging panels, simple petroglyph symbols of nature and early life will be portrayed. On the other side, the images are contemporary: a fish boat and a sail boat, among them.
As always, the design will feature her favourite image: birds in flight. Her grandfather would be proud.
