With Words as their Actions 2014–2019
Two examples from this period illustrate this, Sweet’s Farm , 1994-97, and Dublin Grounds of Remembrance of 2007, both on the facing page. An integral part of these projects was finding the worth, the lost or buried meanings on the site. These were each assembled pieces of land – delimited by surveying and ownership concepts rather than being defined by inherent ecological, geological, phenomenological or cultural meanings of the sites. Our own direct exploration of these sites, and our desire to deeply ‘know’ the sites eventually became the subject and programme for future users, to guide their immersion in the site. These projects were deliberately designed to make you slow down and notice. The projects encourage a daily/habitual use of the site, to experience the nuances of change, to understand that using the site creates history on the site, and unites past histories with emerging histories, to build material memory. The projects were a form of story making and story telling.
In our current instantaneous culture this slowness of story telling is even more difficult. It is in this context that we created With Words as their Actions (2014–2019) the winning entry for the Lyon Station Art competition, part of Ottawa’s new underground transit system. In this project we have created a materially immersive experience that revels in the act of story/ history telling, and in who tells the stories. It immerses the viewer in a tactile, textual, visual and exploratory material experience for seconds to only a few minutes, although likely on a regular basis. Each subway station’s artwork was given a theme. The Lyon station theme was Bytown – Ottawa’s name prior to its becoming the Nation’s capital in 1855. Founded in 1826, Bytown was a bustling place for industry, (primarily timber) as it was strategically located at the junction of the Ottawa River and the newly built Rideau Canal. How could we reveal Bytown in this remote place – far below grade at the lower concourse level, far from the nineteenth century? Our first stop was the library and archives to try to understand what actually happened between 1826 and1855, the short life of Bytown. Our best source was the Ottawa Historical Society where we discovered an excellent essay presented by Anne Dewar in 1953 called ‘The Last Days of Bytown’, a careful and colourful documentation of all aspects of life in Bytown on the eve of becoming Ottawa, from road conditions to civic amusements, the state of the city coffers to the editorial and advertising content of its newspapers. This was interesting enough, but led us to a new exploration into how this history came to us.
Anne Dewar was a member of the Ottawa chapter of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society, which was founded in 1898. This historical society was Ottawa’s first, and from the late nineteenth century until after World War II, all of its members were women. While their husbands were building with wood, stone, rail ties and financial capital, the society’s members were building an edifice of words and stories. In 1955 they decided to include men in their membership and it changed to its current name – the Historical Society of Ottawa. However, in 1898, 72 years after settling the area, these women recognised that an oral passing of history was no longer sufficient, that the material culture of the settlement was being lost through the generations: ‘Friday June 3, 1898. At 4pm, thirty-one of Ottawa’s most prominent women assembled in the drawing room of the Speaker of the House of Commons’ apartment in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. The purpose of the meeting: To form an Ottawa branch of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society. Lady Edgar called the meeting to order and the ladies took their seats... Among the attendees at that meeting on June 3 were the wives of a number of prominent men who represented both political parties as well as the senior ranks of the public service and the upper echelon of the city’s business community.’ — The Historical Society of Ottawa website Their task was to speak across centuries, but they were also women of the nineteenth century. Did they bring their knitting, their needlepoint, deftly stitching while participating in the excited and perhaps radical chatter of creating the society, tasking themselves as the keepers of history? Their research was carefully documented, but the texture and excitement of their conversations – the oral aspect of them sharing their research – is lost. With Words as their Actions attempts to capture this ‘speaking across centuries’ by collapsing time and memory threads (the actual historical content — the history of Bytown, the moment of founding, the 1953 presentation of Dewar’s work, the present and the utterly contemporary fast-paced experience of the subway) just as the thirty-two women would have hoped, passing on oral history while doing ‘women’s work’. The artwork immerses us in their salon and their words; we feel part of their oral history.
Mrs McGarvey, an 1898 founder of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society. charcoal sketch, right, and in stainless steel, above.
PLANT Architect Inc
on site review 36: our material future
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