The local festival that pairs visual artists and creative writers to spark mutually inspired works last weekend filled the Gibsons Public Market with colourful results from six months of collaboration.
The Art & Words Festival was originally held at Mission Point House in 2022. It moved to the Gibsons venue last year. This February, festival organizers again matched novelists, poets, and short story writers with painters, photographers, and mixed-media artists — more than 50 participants in total. Since its inception, the event has involved nearly 80 participants from the Sunshine Coast and Metro Vancouver.
During publicly staged interviews, members of each partnership mused on the serendipities that surged as a result of their cooperation.
Some, like painter Ruth Rodgers and poet Rissa Johnson, worked in isolation until meeting face-to-face during the festival. “We emailed each other back and forth,” recalled Rodgers. “Rissa sent me a number of pieces they had written for the anthology Not An Island, and when I came to this one, it arrested my attention and immediately I had an image in mind.”
Rodgers’s pastel work Sonnet 45 shows tidewaters reflecting an auburn horizon, and is paired with Johnson’s sonnet Dusk, a New Day: “I am the salt in the soft sparkling spray, / From which a grieving glance carved pillars spun.”
Rose Clarke, an artist and art therapist, used acrylics to paint a prismatic portrait of a female face. Its colours stream and swirl from the figure’s brow. Clarke was paired with novelist Andrea Coates. “I aspired to replicate the fragmented, liquescent quality of the painting in my prose,” wrote Coates in a preface to her stream-of-conscious essay Curiosity.
“There is no going back,” it reads. “There is rediscovery.”
Many contributors experimented with techniques outside their usual métiers. Halfmoon Bay watercolourist Hiroshi Shimazaki, who earlier this year exhibited dozens of landscapes at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery, rendered a detail of a street musician in Valparaiso, Chile. The intimate study of concentrated musicianship was inspired by a first-person account written by Mike Starr (Señor Adonis Plays His Cello). “I don’t recognize the music, but it’s beautiful,” wrote Starr of his encounter.
The livelihood of commercial photographer Ramona Hartley may stem from human and animal portraiture, but Hartley was inspired by Karen Webb’s poem Geist to create a ghost-like composite image on wood. The outcome, titled Home, transposes and combines aspects of Webb’s historic hobby farm. “We live in layers,” observed Hartley. Webb’s poem harmonized with Hartley’s image: “Foundations to build on / Ever-changing, evolving, growing, revealing secrets.”
Prose writer Heather Conn — known for her autobiographical novel No Letter in Your Pocket — rocketed to poetic heights by composing Supernova Sky (“jump untethered / into the cosmos / open to whatever comes”). The piece was written to complement the acrylic work Supernova by painter Dawn Miller, who used explosions of colour against indigo depths to represent personal transformation.
“What I really enjoy about the whole Art and Words Festival is that I can collaborate with somebody at a creative level,” said Roger Handling, a Roberts Creek-based designer and artist who has participated in the festival since its 2022 inception. “I do it all the time with work, but for me to do it with my fine art is unusual. And I really enjoy sitting down and responding to whatever the writer has produced.”
Handling created Whoosh, a work in ink, watercolour and pastel as complement to a poem (Unfettered) by Jeminah Rose Hu. “I belong to everyone, / But cannot be tamed,” wrote Hu in her verse.
The festival also included nearly two dozen workshops and readings by Sunshine Coast writers and artists. Musicians Rae Armour and the duo of poet Catherine McNeil and multi-instrumentalist Dino Vassos performed on Friday and Saturday nights respectively.
The anthology of all 2024 Art & Words submissions (featuring cover artwork by participant Jess Hart) is available for purchase from Amazon.
