How to Get An Artist Residency

Because every creative project deserves a great origin story:

One early morning in late November 2019, I was shooting on Deas Island in South Delta, B.C., on the outskirts of Vancouver. The mist was low, the sun was rising and hoar frost covered the ground. It was a spectacular morning. 

As I began walking up island, a white pick-up truck pulled into the parking lot and three people jumped out. They pulled bags of equipment from the back and headed towards the slough. The sign on the door of their truck read Earth Sciences Simon Fraser University. I followed them, of course. 

We spent a few minutes exchanging questions and answers about their work – testing the salinity of the mud, if I recall – and I took a few photos of them in silhouette against the river. 

Back home, I researched and found Department Head, Dr. Brent Ward, sent him the images and said he could use them as he pleased. A few days later, we met at SFU and I pitched him the Artist-in-Residence (AiR) for Earth Sciences.  

He said yes. 

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Scientist Louis Pasteur famously said “Fortune favours the prepared mind.” Here, I think it favoured my habit of collecting rocks from cuts at the side of the road, on beaches, in quarries, and stalagmite-laden caves. My van’s suspension as my witness, I’ve never met a rock I didn’t like. 

They are pebbles in my pockets and buckets beneath seats.  I am enamored by their physical form: their shape, their feel, their colour, their grain, their hardness, their softness, their sharpness, their veins. They are aesthetic powerhouses. Yet, rocks and minerals are only part of the equation.

Earth Sciences is foundational and interconnected. The department overflows with visual and intellectual stimuli around the study of land, water and the environment.  There are the ‘spheres’  – lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere – and the ‘ologies’ – geology, ecology, petrology, mineralogy, climatology, glaciology, geomorphology, paleontology, sedimentology and meteorology. 

Then there’s geomythology – the study of the geologic origins of myths and legends- offering a deep pool of pan-cultural storytelling. Think Sisyphus and his boulder, Noah and his flood, and the earthquakes of Namazu-e, a genre of Japanese block prints starring a catfish godmonster. 

In the arts, the geologic record has been continuously painted, drawn, filmed, photographed, sculpted, worked, cut, used as colour, or incised in metal and stone since forever.

We employ the earth’s riches to build our houses and cities, to feed, transport and sustain ourselves. They are a driver of trade, commerce, culture and, yes, wars.

With the onset of the Anthropocene epoch and its dire human impacts on earth’s geology and ecosystems, the Department of Earth Sciences and its Centre for Natural Hazards Research are at the epicentre of discourse around the future of our planet. 

Really? Could I have picked a better place to be?

Postscript: In March, I slid into the department just days before Covid-19 shut down the university.

We took a field visit. I snapped pics of wall space where my work might hang. I interviewed professors, fellows and grad students about their projects and resources. I peeked into archives and rock collections. And I got my sea legs beneath me as I rushed to get up to speed as quickly as humanly possible.

Then everyone went home.

No, the quarantine didn’t end my residency, although many asked. But it did have the effect of severely limiting distractions as spring hit us hard. Sunshine or not, I couldn’t be anywhere else but bum-in-seat, working, which I was happy about. And everyone else was still there, too, on the other side of the phone and the screen: answering questions, solving problems, writing and planning.

And so we will continue, more or less, until it is otherwise.