The Mayday Project
Collecting materials Since my official retirement from teaching at East Northum- berland Secondary School (ENSS), I have been fortunate to continue working with the school’s Art Club. One of our public service projects was to create an environmental mural project in the school cafeteria. We were motivated to do this by the example of the school’s Environmental Club, which had considerable success promoting environmental progress, including raising money for the installation of a wind turbine to generate electricity for the school. The mural had consid- erable visual impact, but I needed to get outside more and directly engage the real environment in line with all of the guiding principles outlined above. In recent years I have traveled frequently to my home
town to support my elderly mother and her caregivers in deal- ing with her Alzheimer’s Syndrome. This renewed contact with the town of my childhood made me aware of a special gallery that had been created in a disused grist mill: The Visual Art Centre of Clarington. I was pleased to be given a solo show for my paintings, drawings, and prints for Sep- tember 2018. All of the pieces related to the woods and trees that are important touchstones in my life. Even more reward- ing was having extra space available for an experimental installation. So, beginning about the first of May 2017, I made over
fifty visits to the woods and stream in the Bowmanville Valley Conservation Area, collecting just about everything
that should not be there, and photographing my progress and nature-based experiences. Being a former high school teacher and a parent, I was not surprised to find a particular bend in the creek where bush parties had been held, and where garbage and recyclable materials had been left behind. By the time of the exhibition, I had rescued and cleaned 1,154 objects that were available to be featured in the installation. Some things, such as broken glass bottles, were wrapped and removed for disposal.
This brings me to the challenges of taking a class out of
school for such a clean-up. There may be students who would be upset about picking up someone else’s trash, so it may be necessary to recruit a volunteer group — properly outfitted with gloves and any other necessary health/safety equipment — to gather and clean materials. It’s also recommended to check with your board officials or local health units on what dangers are posed in collecting refuse. Broken glass is com- mon, and in rural areas, teachers would have to watch out for exposure to potentially-harmful plants (e.g., Poison Ivy in my community). If your school has an appropriately-sized dishwasher, it may be possible to wash and sterilize items by using it. These challenges aside, a school administration would be pleased with the public relations benefit of students removing waste from an area near their school! In my personal journey to revisit the Bowmanville val-
ley, it was surprising to discover that the party-people had ignited big limbs and leaned them against large cedar trees, killing several. Perhaps they wanted to provide dry firewood for future parties. In any case, I felt I had to try turning them away from that cynical view. As the show at the Visual Art Centre came closer, I asked permission from the conservation area authorities to remove one of the large, partially burned limbs, which I cut in two, and made ready for display as part of the Mayday installation. (The odd contradiction is that the party people were destroying something in the valley, but the forms of charcoal-and-wood that they produced made a beau- tiful addition to my art exhibition.) From time to time, I did leave a few notes for the par-
ty-people, to express hope in the most positive way that I could manage. I urged them to think about the beauty of the place, and to plan on bringing their own children there in the future. I cleaned the site at each visit, checking the woods and stream. To celebrate, I then created an artwork on the ground, usually replacing the fire pits. I used natural materials that were suited to the site: clippings from my own cedar trees at home, stones from the stream, autumn leaves, clay dug from the stream bed, spruce cones, dried milkweed pods in winter, high-bush cranberries, and so on. Students of modern land artists such as the British artist Andy Goldsworthy will rec- ognize their influence.
Digital photography The greatest reward of an environmental approach is simply that I saw a valuable natural area in a focussed way once a week, and was able to photograph some of the aforemen- tioned “ordinary magic” of life: the mature cedar trees, the Mallard ducks, the spawning fish of several species, a mink that I surprised along the stream in early spring, the skele- ton of a horse that emerged from an eroded embankment… The photographs that resulted encouraged me to redouble my efforts with photo-editing and digital paint programs in order
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