Artwork > Salt-Stained Streaks of a Worthwhile Grief

We live in times where increasing floods, fire, and other climate events make it impossible to ignore the need for exploitative and extractive colonial culture to find a different relationship to the land and water. This urgency, coupled with the unpredictability of the COVID pandemic has necessitated in us a spirit of flexibility, gentleness, and generosity. Planned gatherings evolved into exchanges of letters, sound recordings, packages of materials, and other projects. We were called to ask: How do we gather, resist and protect in this time? How do artists counter colonial-capitalist perspectives that support exploitation and extractivism? When we take time to listen to these bodies of water, what do we learn? And what can we give back?

-Fathom Sounds (Alana Bartol, Kat Morris, Genevieve Robertson, Nancy Tam and Jay White)

Salt-Stained Streak of a Worthwhile Grief was curated by Angela Somerset and Denise Lawson. We would like to thank Angela Somerset, Denise Lawson, David Lawson, Tom Elliott, and all of the staff and volunteer team at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, Wedlidi Speck, Caitlin Pierzchalski and Dan Bowen of Project Watershed, Frank Hovenden and Karen Cummins of Comox Valley Nature, and Tracey Saxby of My Sea to Sky. Thank you to Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support of this work. Photos: Alun Macanulty and Kim Holmes, courtesy of Comox Valley Art Gallery.