Fathom Sounds Collective: Salt Stained Streaks of a Worthwhile Grief
to
Comox Valley Art Gallery 580 Duncan Ave, Courtenay, British Columbia V9N 2M7
Kat G Morris, "Leave(s)," 2017
screen-grabs of a 2D animated short film made at Emily Carr University of Art & Design
Opening Event / Artist Talk: Salt Stained Streaks of a Worthwhile Grief
Fathom Sounds artist collective:
Alana Bartol / Genevieve Robertson / Kat G Morris / Nancy Tam / Jay White
Friday March 4, begins at 7pm
Live-streamed event (link will be posted during the week of the event)
“restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise” – Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer
We are a multidisciplinary collective of artists who care about the state of water as a living entity and a flowing field of living bodies. We formed this group to think both collectively and long-term, about the health of water and the role artists play in responding to urgent ecological, political, and social issues that collect around water. We build relationships between beings, and across disciplines, in the hopes of reversing the effects of marine pollution and extractive industries on marine life and water. Salt Stained Streaks of a Worthwhile Grief conjures the depths of our relationships with water through sound design, animation, drawing, and multi-channel video.
Salt Stained Streaks of a Worthwhile Grief is the first exhibition by Fathom Sounds as a collective, and incorporates individual work, collaborative processes centered on this region, and collective work which stems from several residencies we carried out together in Skwxwú7mesh Territory, just north of Vancouver. There, we spent time around the fjord of Átl’ka7sem, where locals are fighting (and winning) a constant battle to protect the waters from a liquid fracked gas pipeline, a waterborne LNG storage facility, and regular mega-tanker traffic delivering LNG overseas. The proposed project sits on the former site of Woodfibre, a 100-year-old pulp and paper mill. Located on the ancestral and Unceded territory of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) peoples, Woodfibre LNG claims to be a remediation project, that will “clean up” the site, removing the remnants of pulp and paper mill and replacing them with liquified natural gas (LNG), a fossil fuel contributing to carbon pollution and global warming.
As with the work people are doing in Squamish, we were drawn to the parallels between water stewardship in Comox/Courtenay, the ancestral and Unceded traditional territory of the K’ómoks First Nation, being undertaken by settlers and Indigenous peoples through habitat restoration and protection education, for the K’ómoks Estuary.
We live in times where increasing floods, fire, and other climate events make it impossible to ignore the need for exploitative and extractive colonial culture to find a different relationship to the land and water. This urgency, coupled with the unpredictability of the COVID pandemic has necessitated in us a spirit of flexibility, gentleness, and generosity. Planned gatherings evolved into exchanges of letters, sound recordings, packages of materials, and other projects. We were called to ask: How do we gather, resist and protect in this time? How do artists counter colonial-capitalist perspectives that support exploitation and extractivism? When we take time to listen to these bodies of water, what do we learn? And what can we give back?
Fathom Sounds Collective includes:
Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Her site-responsive artworks explore divination as a way to question consumption-driven relationships to land, water, and what are colonially known as natural resources. Bartol’s work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and worldwide. In 2019 and 2021, she was long-listed for Canada’s Sobey Art Award. Of Scottish, German, English, French, Irish, and Danish ancestry, Bartol is a white settler Canadian currently living in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Alberta.
Genevieve Robertson is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in environmental studies, working between place-based, collaborative, and contemplative material processes. Her practice explores elemental, geologic and more-than human worlds, reckoning with the schism between primordial time and the current moment of frenzied petro-capitalism, climate change and crumbling ecologies. Her practice is informed by a personal and intergenerational history of resource labour in remote forestry camps all over British Columbia.
Kat G Morris is a 2D animator from Northern BC. She graduated in 2018 with a BMA in Animation from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is currently based in Vancouver where she freelances and creates work with her friends at Flavourcel Animation Collective. Using hand-drawn digital animation, Kat explores the limits and possibilities of narrative storytelling through symbolism, soundscapes, and fluid, illustrative motions.
Nancy Tam is a sound artist and co-creator of interdisciplinary performances. She is a founding member of the interdisciplinary performance collective A Wake of Vultures and Toronto-based Toy Piano Composers collective.Her compositions, performances, and collaborations have toured in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Norway, Hong Kong, the U.S. and throughout Canada. Nancy works and lives as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the S?wx_wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
Jay White is an interdisciplinary artist and animator with a background in environmental engineering. He activates storytelling across multiple platforms and various media to transmit land-based knowledge to future generations. White’s films have won awards internationally and he has exhibited nationally and worldwide. Jay is of Mi’kmaq and European descent, an Assistant professor in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University, and lives in unceded Skwxwú7mesh territory.
We would like to thank Angela Somerset, Denise Lawson, David Lawson, Tom Elliott, and all of the staff and volunteer team at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, Wedlidi Speck, Caitlin Pierzchalski and Dan Bowen of Project Watershed, Frank Hovenden and Karen Cummins of Comox Valley Nature, and Tracey Saxby of My Sea to Sky.
Thank you to Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support of this work.
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