The Sunshine Coast debut of Vancouver-based artist Arleigh Wood was toasted with an opening gala that lived up to the show’s name: Shelter from the storm.
Inside The Kube gallery of Gibsons amid the drizzly darkness of Jan. 5, Wood and a coterie of admirers fostered an atmosphere of implacable conviviality.
“This work is all connected to the idea of home,” said Wood, who was raised in East Vancouver by a mixed-heritage family united by creativity. “My family was always building things, making things, doing different projects and we just had full freedom to do whatever we wanted. They were doing it in a more practical sense. For me, my language is to do it in painting.”
In Wood’s Shelter from the storm series, she collects photographs of abandoned cabins and homes from locations around the West Coast. Using silkscreen techniques, the images are reduced to their essentials: log-lined structures perched atop lanky pilings, flanked by conifers, assailed by gyres of nighttime gusts. Finally, with acrylics and spray paint, Wood overlays visual elements — an amber moon, daubs of copper-coloured starlight — to flesh out tales inspired by her own imagination.
“I put them together into my own kind of narrative,” said Wood. “The importance of building fables goes back to keeping a tradition of carrying on family stories, the ways that we remember things. Sometimes it’s different than how it actually happened. How we hold those memories inside us can keep our spark alive.”
The ascetic style of Wood’s prints — and their titles — are a world away from Thomas Kincaid-style sentimentality and snug bungalows. During a visit to the Jökulsárlón floating glaciers in Iceland, she saw an enormous chunk break loose and tumble into the sea. Her concern about the inevitability of climate change triggered an emotional response and the pangs of nostalgia.
Humanity’s uneasy relationship with its earthly domicile is mirrored in her works like Universal Abandon and The Journey to Higher Ground. For every image that suggests the strength of companionship (Someone Like You depicts two fragile lodgings side-by-side), another reflects vulnerability. In Lost at sea, just you and me, a sole clapboard structure stands above the water surface. A drowned community of buildings and trees is dimly visible underwater.
Wood studied at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. As her work began to experience widespread commercial success (her paintings have regularly featured in films and the Canadian TV series Designer Guys), Wood broadened her repertoire to include new techniques. Her earlier Many ways home series features abstract landscapes inside house-shaped frames. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, she experimented with alcohol inks on yupo paper, producing globe-shaped abstracts as tangible acts of meditation.
“Right now I’m really trying to focus on making work that is completely conceptually what I’m interested in doing, and not simply to market it,” Wood said. “It’s not the easiest thing just to completely follow your intuition and follow your heart.”
Arleigh Wood’s Shelter from the storm artworks are on display at The Kube until Jan. 31.
