Along one of the two main dirt roads on Gambier Island, outside a studio flooded with early May sunshine, 12 custom built crates weighing several tons were being prepared for pick up by Gordie Steele.
Steele would winch them onto a barge to float across to Gibsons, and then load them into a truck to be ferried across to Vancouver. They would be transferred to another truck for the 4,500 km journey to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. These crates, apparently unremarkable except for their heft, contained four electro-mechanical sculptures created by Geoffrey Smedley. Collectively called Dissections. The pieces will be featured in an exhibit opening June 6 at the CCA.
Smedley's mammoth work was inspired by the Cartesian view of man as a compilation of mechanical parts.
Through 20 years of thinking, drawing, sawing, filing, drilling, measuring and fitting together various fragments of wood, metal, glass and wire, Smedley developed this idea literally by creating what he calls the last robot on earth, The Clown, and presenting the initial results of its auto-dissection in four parts: roulette, or will, logos, or memory, escapement, or the pulse of his being, and spine.
Each of the metaphorical machines contains exactly 1,927 parts that the 86-year-old Smedley tooled himself in his Gambier Island workshop.
When asked if it could be possible that all four of the complex machines contained the same number of parts, Smedley replied, "Exactly 1,927; that much is mythologically certain."
This characteristic wryness colours his general view of life and the thoughts that informed his elegant marriage of art and science and philosophy.
The machines themselves are a marvel to observe, the gleaming wood and polished steel, tissues of glass, multi-coloured wires like nerves that animate the structures. When put in motion, they are even more of a wonder.
In roulette, the will, in which Smedley considers the interplay of habit and will, a steel ball, The Seed of Intention, rolls around a metal plate, knocking rhythmically on several pins, or units of waiting, before falling through one of 72 holes. Is the Seed of Intention subject to habit, the Clown wonders, or does it contain genetic memories of freedom? In Logos, laser lights play on a Magritte-like bowler hat, the only easily identifiable human element in an intrinsically humane piece that challenges our view of man and of nature itself. Geoffrey credits wife Brigid with the idea for the hat.
The Smedley's settled on Gambier Island in 1981. He claims he could never have produced this work in London, his birthplace, nor in Vancouver, where he was professor of art at the University of British Columbia from 1978 to 1992, because he prefers solitude. And Brigid, whom he depends upon completely, is a natural conversationalist, said Geoffrey, with brimming affection.
Many of the 150 or so permanent residents of Gambier Island also provide support when called upon. The Smedleys endured a 2004 fire that spared his workshop, but destroyed the house containing their extensive library, and have had to deal with health setbacks from time to time. A recent eye affliction threatened his vision, but he's back in business after months of treatments and only rarely mistakes one wire for another, as happened recently with a miscue on Logos, which he was busily adjusting even as his friends George Stuart and Ray Woods sawed and hammered the moving crates into shape.
"Descartes had many socks, and many many more ideas," Smedley said.
The same might be said of the octogenarian sculptor who, with Brigid, will follow the machines to Montreal to prepare for the opening of the exhibition, which will remain at the CCA until Aug. 11. A book tour and series of lectures will follow in September.
