The authors and artists whose collaborative creations were unveiled last week during the Art and Words Festival in Gibsons repeatedly acknowledged that a powerful force ran through their pairings: serendipity.
Novelist P.J. Reece and bookbinder Stephen Murphy live in communities only 15 minutes apart. Yet each had never heard of the other before discovering that both had formative adventures on African rivers. Reece paired his Zambezi-inspired essay A Story is a River with Murphy’s encaustic artwork, which was shaped by his time on the Congo River.
During an everyday ramble near Hackett Park, Mike Starr witnessed children blowing large soap bubbles. His imaginative work of fiction Bubble Portal inspired painter Wendy Harford to render a numinous landscape whose playful children, brilliant sunflowers and azure sky offer a message of hope for the people of Ukraine. (Harford plans to donate the work to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife Olena Zelenska.)
Working with painter Sheri Peters, poet Monica Davis revisited a childhood visit to a nearby farmhouse — and her verse The Gate at Hea’s Farm blossomed into Peters’s dazzling study of florals and sky titled A Memory at Sunset.
The festival was founded in 2022 by the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society. Early in the year, artists and writers are paired at random. Each partnership collaborates to generate written and visual works, which were displayed at the Gibsons Public Market during the three-day festival. A 100-page anthology of all entries was also published (and sold out of two successive printings during the festival).
For the first time, the nearly 70 participants included seven student duos from the Sunshine Coast Alternative School. The school’s art instructor Crystal Boeur herself participated in the festival, paired with poet Michael Healey. (Healey also contributed a photograph that inspired poetry by Pammila Ruth.)
“My original participation was creating partnerships for my students to become part of the festival,” Boeur said. “I’m not really a practising artist, other than I do art all the time as part of my career, and I love producing my own enjoyment and sample work for my students.”
Boeur created resin-coated ravens from plywood cutouts, complementing Healey’s poem Morning Ravens. “It’s in the early morning that the Ravens come / floating on the breeze like burned out embers / from a distant fire,” it begins.
Raven motifs became an unplanned touchstone across several artist-writer pairs: Hazel Bell-Koski’s silkscreened Raven depicted a backward-glancing bird whose body is formed of sharp-lined geometries.
“I’m continuing to see things in it,” said David Kipling, whose accompanying memoir is titled Flap. “Hazel and I didn’t work together [in-person], and I’m glad we didn’t, because when we met, she was so direct. She created her piece and I did mine. Very often artistic kinship means that both people change, but in this case no: both people simply reacted strongly to the work of the other.”
In some cases, words and artworks fused directly. Lines from Jane Mellor’s poem The Wolf and I are imposed atop the oil painting of the same title by Roger Handling. “I wonder / what makes the clouds dip low at dusk, / suspended over the burnt earth of summer?” Mellor writes.
“Her poem was full of innate imagery that made it pretty easy for me to gather together visual expressions,” Handling recalled. “Ever since I started collaborating with authors, I’ve been wondering if I could actually incorporate their text into my artwork without losing the impact of the visual that I was cobbling together.” In Handling’s seascape, an eruption of tenebrific cloud coalesces into the form of a wolf baying at an amber moon.
In other cases, writers themselves became part of the artwork. Artist Jane Richardson suggested that she use poet Doris Good’s likeness for a two-part portrait. “When she first told me I was going to be the subject, I said: no, no,” remembered Good. “But I realized that she’s really into it, and we’re going to have to do this.”
Good’s poem Left Brain... Right Brain was matched with Richardson’s Taylor Meets Doris, in which Good’s left- and right-brain personas are depicted through images drawn by Richardson with her left and right hands respectively.
Festival attendees voted to select a people’s choice award. The honour was presented to writer Kathleen Vance (The Dress) and painter Cate Baldwin, whose acrylic artwork depicts a dress-clad woman in a broad-brimmed hat loping languidly toward a fulgent seashore.
