Bobbi Clackson-Walker | Storied Skies

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Bobbi Clackson-Walker, “Storied Skies,” 2024

(courtesy of the Gallery)

The act of looking at a vast expanse of sky over a broad and endless horizontal plane is a quintessential activity of life on the prairies. Since childhood, cloud formations in the broad expanse of sky have fueled my imagination and grounded me with a sense of place. Cloud formations can appear as slow-moving animations or be reminiscent of a personally held memory or experience. They are our memories and musings served up to us on a distant panoramic screen of atmosphere. My lifetime on the prairies has provided me with a rich and visual library of cloudscapes which  I called upon in creating the Storied Skies exhibition. 

Each artwork in the exhibition was created from a salt crystal monoprint that has been hand coloured with watercolour, coloured pencil, indelible ink, and encaustic wax. The process of creating a salt crystal monoprint is multifaceted. It involves growing a salt bloom on paper from a diluted solution of mineral salt. The mineral salt bloom is then dehydrated on the paper and a chemical solution is applied, creating an etched surface or a monoprint of the negative space around the salt bloom pattern. No two salt crystal monoprints are alike, and once the salt crystals have etched the paper, they dissolve and cannot be replicated.

Much of my art practice is motivated by discovery, that is, creating with an attitude of 'what happens when' and looking deeply at the results for clues of how to progress further.  The patterns of salt crystal formations captured in the monoprinting process are entirely abstract. To me, that abstracted patterning is reminiscent of appterning I see elsewhere in nature. The "Storied Skies" abstracted monoprints provided me an opportunity to express what I saw as cloudscapes anchored by a broken plain, a landscape so quintessential to the prairies.  In truth, the artworks were created as much by examining the salt crystal abstracted patterning, and interpreting my memories in that patterning, as by the processes I employed in rendering them. - Bobbi Clackson-Walker