 Good evening everyone. My name is Taryn Urquhart and I am the Arts and Special Events Programmer here at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. On behalf of the library and the West Vancouver Art Museum, I would like to welcome you tonight to our art talk titled Martha Stewart and Conversation with Hillary Letwin. While I recognize that we are all in different places tonight, I would like to acknowledge that for those of us that live in North and West Vancouver, we are meeting, albeit virtually, within the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish Nation, Slavic Nation, and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect them as nations in this territory, as well as their historic connection to the lands and waters around us since time immemorial. I am personally grateful to call the Pacific Northwest my home and I'm thankful to the Coast Salish communities that continue to protect the natural beauty and animal diversity that surround me every day. And now, over to Hillary, who is waiting at the museum. Thank you very much, Taryn, and thank you to all of you joining us this evening. Welcome to the West Vancouver Art Museum and our current exhibition, All Fall Down with Martha Sturdy, which is on here at the Art Museum until December 17. I'm delighted to be here with Martha this evening. Thank you for joining us, Martha. And we're going to take the next little while to speak about your work in this current exhibition and how it fits into the larger context of your work. So I wonder if you might start by talking a little bit about how this particular exhibition came about. Well, thank you for inviting me to be here. It was great honor to be involved with the West Vancouver Art Museum. It is the first museum show that I have done, and so it was very exciting. And I had a chat with Ian Wallace, who's a Canadian artist that actually taught me art history as a student, and he said, do something important to you. So I thought about it, and I immediately had a point of view, and this is what we got. So this is new work that really hasn't been shown in public before. You were great generous in letting us be the first venue to show it. And essentially it's comprised, for those of you who have not yet seen the exhibition, it's comprised of four different sculpture installations, three of which you made specifically for this exhibition and one of which is an older work, but which fits into the larger progress of work. So these four sculptures are never seen before to the world. We have three inside and one outside, which we'll talk about a little bit later. The piece that we're sitting directly next to, we're calling All Down Lund, and each of the pieces carries the same title, All Down, and these works are the first thing that you see when you walk through the gallery door. We typically have an audio track in here, which we can talk about in a minute, but they're incredibly spare and stark pieces. So let's talk about your inspiration for the pieces behind us, All Down Lund. What are they inspired by? Well, to start with, I saw the first forest fire when I was about ten. We were going to Kelowna in the car, my father and mother and three siblings, so four kids in the car. Sure was fun. And to my amazement, I saw this right at the side of the road, a black hill and the whole forest was burned. And I really couldn't get over it because it was, you know, from whole Princeton, there's lots of green and then all of a sudden black. So that was my first influence of what really happens when there's fire. Then my husband and I purchased a piece of property in Pemberton that has a very old cedar woods in it, and the trees are four feet, five feet across some of them, and they're very beautiful. But there are also burned trees there that are 15 or 20 feet high, and they're burned, like, a long time ago, obviously, because the tree next to them is 200 or 300 years old. So therefore, that fire happened long before, you know, the last 100 years. So this property in Pemberton has been a huge inspiration for you in making these pieces. In fact, I believe all of the wood in the exhibition is from that property. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the process in making these pieces that we see behind us? Okay. Well, we've owned this property since 1990. And the cedar woods, I love going in it, but it was very, it's got bears. I've been riding my horse through it, and there's coyotes and deer. It was over here, deer over here, and I'm going, you guys, you know, you're there. Everybody knows what's going on. There's a mother bear right now with three babies, and there's another single male, about a two-year-old who's on his own. And we stop. My horse stops. He looks at the mother bear and the three babies. We stop. We look. And then Porter, my horse says, I think we should turn around. I say, okay. And then we just turn around. No drama. It's so calm and so beautiful. And always, everybody's interacting, but we all have our own priorities and our barriers. And I'm very fortunate to have that luxury because I did not grow up with that, but it's something that I've come to appreciate. So there's a lot of, the forest is teeming with life, I think is probably an appropriate way to say it. So you hand-selected all of these pieces of wood, and tell us about what you do to them. Well, I have spent a lot of time walking, and I've made a lot of roads and paths, not roads and paths. I have two directors, and I go all over the property, and I make paths for riding the horse. And I also find that there are all kinds of trees that just fall down. And you think, oh, that shouldn't fall down, but everything has its cycle and some things just fall down. So there are trees that have been lying there for maybe 100 years. Cedar does a lot. And so I then started taking my tractor, chaining up the trees and hauling them in, splitting them into wedges, because they split as a circle. When you put a wedge on, it splits into sections, like triangles. And then what I would do is I would burn the wood. I'd make a little fire, not too big. And I'd burn the wood because what I was trying to do is my influencer was one tree that is 20 feet with sections here and here and here. So I didn't want to touch that. So I took, because it is what it is, and I wanted to be there for everyone to observe the beauty of it so I would not injure it. But I did get trees that had fallen down that I would then split, and then I would build this fire and I would pull them through the fire. And originally, sometime ago, I used to just burn a little bit, but then what I wanted to do is not just the, not just the fact that they're burned, but I love the charcoal. I love the texture. I love the way it burns sort of as a pattern. And the actual roughness of it is the way it is. But if you actually take a piece that has been through the fire and you start touching it, it all flakes. It rots. So I had to seal them to preserve them so that when I brought them in here, you wouldn't have cedar burned ash everywhere in the museum. And for that, you think? So you treated them with resin of the leaves? Yes. What I did is I took an air hose and sprayed them so that any really loose pieces flick off. I have a compressor at my studio at harm. And then I took a light coating of resin to seal them because otherwise they wouldn't, they'd all fall apart. And then we sprayed them with a matte finish because resin usually is shiny. I did put a fixative in it to make it kind of matte, but it wasn't matte enough. I wanted it to be as you would find it in the woods. I had to make it strong enough to preserve the way it is. But each one is telling you the story of how that tree grew, where the knots were, how it's layered. There's so much that you learn how the tree was as a tree. And I'm not destroying anything that's growing. I'm just only using what has fallen down. Yes, yes. So we have three pieces here and we have five on the other side of this room. And they're each unique. They're each absolutely beautiful to look at in detail. And then you have them set onto these plates. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what the plates are? Well, the whole story of all fold down is really about when there's a fire, then the land dries out, then when it rains, the water just washes off the land. And also there is a pattern where it dries out like a riverbed. And so the ground is cracked. So the whole picture of what is the way trees, you know, when trees are growing, they absorb the moisture and the rain and the water. And when it's all dry, it all just runs off and the whole place becomes like a desert. And you get these cracks. Right. It's always interesting to see people come into the space because some people walk reverently around the plates and other people walk right across them. There's no stopping them. So it's interesting to see how people are interacting. Well, it can't get ripped. No, no, it's pretty intense. I have an open mind anyway. You know, it's like, my art is my point of view, but others have different ones and that's okay. So let's talk a little bit about Alpha Dome 2, the second piece in the exhibition. So this is a wall mounted piece. And it's also black wood, but it's a little bit different. Do you want to tell us about how that piece came about? Well, it is, I have to be very cautious on how I do this because there is nothing wrong with logging. There's nothing wrong with anything as long as it's done in the right direction. And the chain that is on that collection of wood is one that we found on the beach. And it's a homologuing boom. And so I'm not to make a decision on whether we should do or not do. I think everything in its time should be done, but I just thought it was appropriate. It's so rusted and so beautiful as a piece. And I just thought, well, I was going to chain it up with other kind of things because it's about how we process wood and the all falling down is the way I wanted to say it looks like a disaster. And it can be considered a disaster, but everything we do in this world, if you start looking at it, steel is bad, brass is bad, wood is bad, resin is bad, copper is bad, mining, you know, the whole thing. So it's like that is showing you, yes, all of this is true. Let's talk about the way in which you arranged all fall down to because it's a very striking installation. And I will preface this by saying, for those of you in the audience who don't know, this is a very different type of exhibition for us. We're accustomed to filling every square inch of wall space and illuminating the space very brightly. And this exhibition in contrast is a very spare installation. It's a very environmental installation. As I said earlier, we have the audio track, you have sort of lower lighting, very dramatic lighting. So for us, this is a very different type of installation. And we, you and I, made a cautious decision in room two to have just the wall mounted piece and nothing else on the walls. And it, I've heard from a number of visitors that it becomes a very contemplative sort of meditative environment for people. And one just has this one wall mounted piece to look at and to focus on. And the way in which you've arranged the wood for all fall downs is extraordinary. And it still gets me every time. When you walk in, there are some pieces that are hanging precariously that seem almost to be falling out of the bundle of wood. And you always want to instinctively lean forward and catch it as it falls. You've lightened it before to a collection of pickup sticks that are falling down. So there's a real parity to the installation. And it's very striking. I'd love to hear about why the wood is black again and why he chose to arrange the work of the week. Well, I think the first part is that when you enter this room, you kind of look at it and kind of go, there's a subliminal noise here. So it started with, in my mind, I wanted this to be hard to deal with. I wanted this to be a kind of a wake up. Because I think it's all part of what I see as very important. Because we kind of dismiss everything. It's not that bad. And so I went to the BBC, which have a program for sound. And they have all kinds of sounds. And so I listened to all these different tapes and different sounds. And what I wanted it to be is like a slow, a low kind of whistle moan. And that was to do with a forest that is burned and empty and lonely and disastrous, actually. And I want to shock people. I want to say, this is what can happen. This is where we're going. This is what we are. And so then we get to the second one, which is all part of the same story, but more to do. This is like, this area is about a forest that's burned. That is about a forest that's harvested. And what happens often is they harvest all the trees. And then it has rot in the middle. Or it has something wrong with it. Or it isn't long enough. Or it isn't stable enough. Or it's fractured inside. Cedar actually rocks from the inside out. And so that wood, often, if you go into the woods, you find all this wood that's not being used. It's been discarded. Yes. And that is the reality. So that's why I put that. Yes. It's a very striking piece and so dramatic in its delivery. I wonder now, I'd like to mention the piece in Gallery 3, which one can see just behind us. It's a piece from 10 years ago. Maybe even more. You asked me recently how long ago I've been doing wood. And it's got to be at least 20 years. But I've always had, what I like to do is wood is this. I like wood to tell us where it has been and what has happened to it. I don't want to saw it up on a bandsaw and make poles and this and that that are all structured on me superimposing my idea on wood. I want wood to talk to me and tell me what it has been through and how it grew and where its branches were and how it has existed. And each of these pieces could be a lot older because this tree could have been lying on the ground for, it could have been dead 40 years ago or 100 years ago. There is a funnicide that grows on the inside of the trees and rots them and it can happen over a couple of hundred years. And so a tree may fall down because it rotted from the inside out and it's in the soil, it's not anything man did. So that piece, I chose those pieces because I love the way where the branches grew, the little sort of peaks and valleys. And then to show it, I decided to put a piece of brass behind it. I've worked in brass for years and years and years and I did that too. Kind of give it that light so that you see the beauty of the actual wood. It sort of reflects there. And the black really contains that as well. Of course I like black. You like black anyway, but one really sees the details in each of the installations with the wood and black because I think in a way it really showcases the individual features of each piece. And then you also observed previously that the brass that sits between the two pieces of wood in the third piece, there's an elevation that's happening with the materials and it's sort of gone from something very natural and earthy to something quite kind of polished. And I think that's a really interesting contrast. And you've sort of provided us with the perfect segue to talk a little bit about how you see these installations, these sculptures, these new works, fitting in with your sort of larger corpus of work because you've been a sculptor since art school I think. So I would like to talk about the piece outside but before we do that I'd like to hear a little bit from you about how you've seen these pieces being a continuation of your work as a sculptor. Well, over the years what happened was I went one year at Emily Power which was called the Bank of your School of Art at the time. And then my husband went to university for the next eight years and I worked. And so I only had one year of art school and then after he started having a job I went back to art school and I graduated when I was 35 which was a great advantage, not a disadvantage and that's the way I look at my life anyway. Everything's an advantage because I was ready then to learn everything whereas when you're 18 and you're at art school you don't necessarily have the right mindset to really take advantage. Some people at 18 are ready to absorb it all, I was not. So when I did graduate I had, I graduated in sculpture and I had made maquettes and wearable sculpture all the way through art school. I was always making things. And so I then got divorced and I had to earn a living and four years of art school doesn't always prepare you to have a good job. And so, and I had three children of course. So I was, I worked with Hope Renfrew and I worked with the Bank of the Art Gallery and I worked with the AGO and I did wearable sculpture which was in American Vogue, Italian Vogue, French Vogue and I went from art school to Vogue magazine. And what it was is small maquettes of things that I wanted to do larger but of course I had my limitations. So I had really, you know, you get out of art school and you're already involved. It was pretty heavy. And it got to the point where it would be vogue on the phone again. What did they want? I mean it sounds outrageous but at the time that was the way it was. And then it got very practical because, you know, food and children and everything. And then in the last ten years, I just said enough, I don't really care about anything functional, I want to make sculpture. And so, and more I spent in the woods and looking at things and, you know, understanding how insignificant we as human beings are and how phenomenal natural world is and how we should respect it and look after it and it has a lot to teach you and why I was able to learn a lot is that I've done all the other things that seemed important and then I'm now down to the point of saying, okay, this is where I believe I should start using my abilities to influence others to what a luxury it is to be living in our world and to show the things like trees and how important they are and how we can make them help us if we help them. Yes, so we'll talk about that in a minute, those are a larger message but I just want to speak very quickly about your use of different materials in your career because I think that you've always pushed materials to their limits and a good example of that is resin in particular, which of course you're still using here. But I'd like to think about these installations as part of your larger production in this way because you're always pushing your materials to do something a little bit different. With the wood in this case you're burning into a point of being almost destroyed, not entirely but almost. And so I think also we can think about scale, what you were saying about wearable art, your maquettes your jewelry started out as your models for something you would have loved to have seen in large scale and so you've always played with scale in that way and I think that these works are a really excellent way for you to express that interest in the big and the huge and the oversized. We were leading a tour a few weeks ago for the public looking at all fall down to the wall mounted piece and someone pointed out that the chain that we were speaking about earlier was wrapped around the wood and it had a, it was fastened with a toggle clasp, it was almost like it was a bracelet for the wood and so I love that there's this, I don't know if that was an intentional reference or an unintentional reference to your jewelry, but I love that it's there and part of that piece and was it intentional of that? Well, you see there's nothing to do in this world. That's the way I look at it anyway. So I have another one too, which I'm saving for something else but I think where we were looking, where we found that was right on a beach where there had been an anchor on the rocks for logging booms probably in the 30s or 40s and just my luck that we found it. In fact, actually I didn't find it, my son, one of my sons, Caleb found it and I just thought it was beautiful and I liked it. No, saved it, but I would hate to just, I think that it is a different, the same thing. You make those kind of clasps on where we're supposed to do but I don't know who influenced you on that. The chain is newer than some of my wearable sculptures, newer to me and not newer but newer to me. I have to say one of my favorite moments of our opening reception which was attended by members of the public a few months ago a lot of people came wearing your wearable sculpture and that was quite gratifying to see everybody so I liked that. I got that in the 1990s, I got that in 2000. It was really special. So I'd like to now turn our attention to the work outside, I'll call down four and this was unusual for us here at the Westman Cooper Art Museum to have a piece installed outside. It's only the second piece of public art we've ever displayed in the garden here at Gertrude Lawson House. I'd like to talk a little bit about that work because that's the piece that sets the tone for people who are coming in but it's also the ray of optimism that we get from you in this exhibition. So I'd like to start just by talking about the work itself. You had it installed a few weeks before the exhibition opened and it immediately started drawing visitors in. We've had a number of people stop to read the signage and to engage with us about it and a number of people said, well, can we keep it? Which unfortunately we can't for a few different reasons but it's a very dramatic piece and it sits in a location where there had once been a very tall evergreen tree which we heard from one of our previous visitors. So tell me about all fall down four tell me about what it is. Well, I'll start with Bunny Park. Okay, so I decided that we agreed that I could put something outside and I originally thought, okay, well, I want to do something that is rough, not all organized and so I went to the people working for the West Bend Parks Department and asked them about getting some trees and they said, oh yes, but you could go to the beach and you could get some off of that and I thought, oh, it sounds too complicated and then I went into my woods again just like my storage place for all these old trees because the property is a 48th parcel and there's probably about 15 to 20 acres of old cedar and there are trees everywhere falling down. People think that forests are all smooth and tidy, they can't even drive through them mostly. So I chained them all up and then I didn't have enough so then I have horse jumps around the property where I make cradles and I put crossbars of trees and they've been there because I've been jumping for a lot of years rock, full of bugs. So I decided that that would actually project more about what I'm trying to say than the fancy nice newly cut wood and so I went around and chained them up and towed them in and piled them all up in a big pile and I had to cut one because it was too long and the chainsaw but otherwise they all came from wherever they were, full of bugs, full of carbidurants too which I could do no more. They're mostly gone. Well I think I kind of edited them out when I stained the wood which is black stain, they do not like that, I know that. And so then I had to find a truck hi-ab that would get them down here because I had the pile in, the hemorrhaging and then I had to talk to a structural engineer and he said well have you got a drawing of the plan and I go um, copy and maybe. Because you can't, once you get it here then you can see the right way for it to go. You can't just say oh well we'll just put it this way with this log and this log, bugs are logs and you have to place it so it looks perfect but you can't pre-educate yourself to exactly how it's going to be because on the land who knows how it's going to sit so I sort of said I could have a plan. You presented a very good plan. And then I found a gentleman who had a smaller hi-ab truck and so he strapped all the pieces on the back of the truck and I met him here, I don't know was it seven in the morning? It was seven in the morning. And then I was actively involved completely okay this is one, I want this bigger one here and this one over here and when you come and look at it you say oh this is sort of rotten here and that's what I wanted because if you look at that whole story yes it is big logs but what I placed in the crevice of one of the logs is a small cedar tree because the forest will regrow itself it will, if we look after it it will because recently I was riding my horse on the north side of my forest and while grass grows it's canary grass mostly and it can grow up to about five or six feet so you don't really know what's on the north side so I am sitting on my horse and in October and the grass is all kind of flattened down and I counted nine new trees on the north side of the wood and I'm thinking wasn't it lucky this spring the month of June was so wet people complained about it being too wet I was going oh lucky my little trees are growing and that forest is adding to itself and that just gives me such joy because what happens in the middle of the big forest is nothing grows like there's no grass on the ground or anything because the forest is so old and so dark and so there won't be little seedlings in the middle of the forest because it's an old serious forest so that little seedling, that little cedar sapling outside nestled into the roots of that forest sculpture installation is our way of hope so why don't you tell us how do you want more viewers to feel as they're reading this exhibition well I want them to first come into this room and kind of go whoa this is like negative it is and it's supposed to be I want the wind to blow I want the noise to be this is how bad it is this is the reality this is what is happening and it's you know in a way the forests are part of climate change and it is serious and I'm a layman on that subject you know I don't know a lot and then I go into the middle of the second room where it is about logging which I am not saying is bad because forests that don't get cleaned up and tidied up also are a problem you know it's not just sheer the land and then when you go to the outside I'm sort of saying you know if we are wise enough and sensible and mature enough to be generous of spirit and look after the forest then the forest will look after us and that is the same as climate change it's a disaster but it doesn't have to be and as human beings we have over the years even in my short lifetime dealt with all kinds of issues about you know you look at England and the problems with the environment in the 50s with coal burning coal and acid rain and hole in the atmosphere and all these things and we figured them out and I think if we really put our minds to it we will figure this one out too and this is gone a lot farther than a lot of those others and I'm not going to lecture on anything because I'm nobody but it is something that every child should think of in an optimistic way you want people to leave here and find solutions which I think is completely right we shouldn't fall into a puddle on the floor it is not the end of the world this is just another way to call it's our responsibility to do something constructive and that's what I'm trying to say as an artist hi Marfa this has been such a pleasure working with you on this project and talking with you this evening thank you very much for joining us I really appreciated you giving me the opportunity to try and have an influence on maybe one person and if you do that in life then you are successful so I appreciate being asked thank you and thank you very much for joining us this evening please come and see our exhibition which is open until December 17th we have an exhibition publication that we produced which is available for purchase here with two excellent essays by Robin Lawrence and Craig Burnett we look forward to seeing you here soon