Contemporary Canadian Glass

By Brad Copping

Having the opportunity to travel during the summer months in Canada has a certain pleasure.  For me the ability to pitch a tent and camp along the way has always been a means of moving towards a better understanding of other places.  As a child my parents would secure a pop up tent trailer from friends for the annual two week road trip through Ontario’s provincial parks, or the one special year when we toured the east coast, the strongest memory being of a late night wind storm tear-down in some pasture/campground/lighthouse on the Gaspé Bay peninsula.

During my time at the School of Craft and Design I had the good fortune to experience the spring and late fall camping trips that Kevin Lockau lead back into the quartzite hills of Killarney Park.  While the weather was not always amenable to skinny-dipping I think it was on these trips that I started to learn that my muse would reveal itself when I allowed my mind to quiet and simply observe and respond.  That observation was on both a grand scale, the forms generated by landscape, and also on a micro scale, the things between the rocks, or hidden below the surface of the water.  The response would involve the manipulation of materials on hand in the place and feedback from others doing the same and, while we would document our endeavors, in the end it was not the arrangement of sticks and stones that was important but how the whole experience affected how we made our own work.

While my muse has revealed itself in these and other designated sacred spaces, it has recently been kicking my ass down a few thousand kilometers of southern Saskatchewan gravel roads, tracking the Swift Current River from its headwaters near the historic town of Eastend and the continental divide there which sends the stream in the next coulee to the besieged Gulf of Mexico, and north through its winding route where it meets the South Saskatchewan River at a point where the Saskatchewan has been drowned under a lake named for a politician and created by a dam named for another.  While my first experience of Saskatchewan was a brief star-gazing rest stop of the roof of my long dead ’77 Honda Accord hatchback somewhere on the Trans-Canada, I have since come to love this much overlooked province.  My current journey was inspired in part by reading “River in a Dry Land,” a book given to me some years ago by my partner Sue Rankin’s brother Mike.  Trevor Herriot’s writing about the Qu’Appelle River basin is told with a keen naturalist’s and traveler’s eye, but is grounded in the compassion of a lifelong community member of this watershed.  Although the headwaters of the Qu’Appelle are also buried under Lake Diefenbaker, the river’s soft green shoulders form one of the most picturesque valleys in the Canadian prairies.  And so I followed that valley to the southeast, crisscrossing it as many times as possible before dropping in to the north side of Rankin Marsh (named for the conservation efforts of Sue and Mike’s grandfather Andy Rankin).  The marsh sits at the top end of Buffalo Pound Lake, another man-made lake which supplies both drinking water and extensively utilized recreational opportunities to the residents of Regina and Moose Jaw.  Just beyond the lake’s dam is where the Moose Jaw River joins the Qu’Appelle and this confluence headed me back south to the city of Moose Jaw and a visit with the curator of the city’s expansive public art gallery, Heather Smith, with whom I am working on a personal exhibition for next spring.

The trip home with my ever hopeful canoe still on the van roof did not diminish the muse’s pushing and prodding and dragging of feet through the water rich vastness of northern Ontario.  But home and its own sacred calling meant most of this would have to wait for another summer.  So now the hard work begins, teasing out the questions and digging up some answers, meshing my past Saskatchewan experiences and creating my responses to this journey, this portage across the prairies.

What have you experienced this summer that is inspiring you and your work?