The inaugural Sunshine Coast exhibition of an artist from Vancouver Island’s Mill Bay reveals new ways of seeing the deep-rooted sentinels that line both sides of the Salish Sea.
David Martinello travelled from the Cowichan Valley to install his show, Conversing Gestures, and introduced it during a public reception at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery on Sept. 28. Martinello creates in a variety of mediums but his sculptures and prints stem from a subject that has intrigued him since a childhood spent gathering sticks from the forest floor: wood.
“There’s an agency to wood, to its nature, its essence, that I don’t want to belittle or objectify in any sense,” he said. “It’s like I’m working with it, I’m working for it, I’m working beside it. A tree has all the belonging that it needs. I just happen to have the skill set where I can see how it can be transmuted into different things like construction materials, and its more esoteric aspects into things like my sculpture.”
In his sculptures like Fashion for Function, species intermingle: walnut, maple and cedar. The surface is tanninized, charred, lacquered. Rough-hewn and knotted limbs are fitted into a configuration that splays, blossom-like, opening to the sky.
Even his smallest three-dimensional pieces, like Plume (a lacquer-darkened whorl of wood set atop a coarsely stained block), suggest directionality and momentum. They evoke the illusory stillness of trees, in motion on a scale that surpasses human ken. Meanwhile, in Confluence (which also includes cherrywood), the fusion’s ungainly stance seems almost anthropomorphic.
“The lifespan of an alder tree is 70 years,” he said. “So if I was to plant one, it grows beyond [my own lifetime]. There’s a scalability and this is where I have to bring the idea of legacy, with ideas of reconciliation and environmental issues. There’s a legacy to the wood that I try to celebrate as well. It [represents] something that’s beyond myself.”
Martinello’s sculptures are complemented by dozens of ink woodblock prints, created from flame-licked and water-washed cross-sections of trees. Each one bears all the markings of abstraction — thick strokes in green flutter at the periphery — but are anchored by familiar patterns of tree rings. In Imprint 10725, ornament and symmetry draw the viewer’s eye to a central void. In Imprint 3874, only a fragment of grain is recognizable as such; instead, the image hints at a wood-carved harp or dulcimer.
“Everybody collaborates with wood,” Martinello said, “like when you put your glass down on a wooden table. In that action, it’s something that we all share.”
Martinello whittled his artistic vision during fine art studies at universities in southern Ontario. In Victoria and beyond, he has become a consistent contributor to public dialogue about art, nature and design: he currently serves on advisory bodies in Tofino, Nanaimo and Victoria. His public art pieces are on display in Oak Bay and Nanaimo, with a forthcoming project in the latter municipality soon to be announced.
During his visit to the Sunshine Coast for the inauguration of Conversing Gestures, Martinello led a printmaking workshop for students of Cedar Grove Elementary. He prepared and transported over a dozen blocks from trees he harvested himself in the Cowichan Valley.
The pupils learned to collaborate with the rounds, making literal and metaphorical impressions.
“Wood,” explained Martinello, “is the literal and symbolic framework of our lives.”
The mixed media of Conversing Gestures by David Martinello is on display at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery until Oct. 27.
