(Working on a section of the Norman Yates mural test install)

For the first time in two-and-a-half years, the Norman Yates mural, currently undergoing an extensive restoration in the Edmonton Arts Council conservation lab, is upright.

In February 2017, the EAC conservation team spent a week at the Stanley A. Milner Library cutting the 160 square-foot artwork from the wall it had adorned for nearly 50 years. Since then, the team has spent months meticulously grinding about three inches of architectural plaster from the back of each panel, then stabilizing each and addressing losses to the edges.

“We are exactly where we wanted to be on the timeline,” says Public Art Conservator Andrea Bowes. “The dry fit stage is complete. That’s when we tested the system we developed for attaching the mural to the wall, saw how well the panels fit together from end to end, and figured out what we need in terms of resources – that’s equipment, people, and time – and how much work we’ll have to do [once we start installing at the renovated library].”

(Most of the Yates mural standing upright)

The latest project milestone is the successful development and testing of the attachment system. It was developed in-house, says Bowes, and should hold the mural in place for at least another 50 years. “We are working with a mechanical and an adhesive system. We have cleats on the back of each panel, which will slot into recipient cleats on the wall. This hanging system will be reinforced with mortar – the cleats will hold everything in place while it dries. It’s very secure – we estimated that we needed to support 10 pounds per square foot, but the actual weight is much less than that, so our system is more than adequate.”

(Detail showing gaps between the panels, which will be filled in when the mural is installed at the Stanley A. Milner Library)

Although upright, the artwork itself is not yet visible as the tissue paper and fish glue facing applied by the team in 2017 is still in place and will remain so until the seams between each panel are assessed and filled. “The paper protects the paint layer so when we fill the areas between the panels, we can take off the excess and not worry about scratches.” After that, the work becomes even more painstaking and laborious. “The filled areas between the panels will be in-painted, integrating them with the intact mural. We have the artist’s original shopping list, so we know what his colour palette was. This is very useful as a starting point to understanding his work. It will be about finesse, patience and the ability to read colours. Luckily Jenika [Sobolewska, Conservation Assistant] is a master at this work.”

(Yates mural in 2017 before the EAC Conservation team removed it from the Stanley A. Milner Library)

Although the work won’t be completed for another six months at least, Bowes feels satisfied as she surveys the work so far. “When we started this in 2017, we weren’t sure what would happen. There was a chance the mural would not be recoverable. [I] had to do a lot of problem solving as the work went along. I’m pretty excited now by all the work over the past two-and-a-half years, that everything we’ve planned will work for us!”

This is the fourth article in a series

Click here for the first article from February 2017. 

Click here for the second chapter from April 2018.

Photo credit: Yulia Skogoreva

This morning, it was announced that Nisha Patel will be the City of Edmonton’s eighth Poet Laureate. 

Nisha Patel is an award-winning Indo-Canadian poet & artist. She is the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion and Edmonton Slam Champion, and a recipient of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award. She is also the Executive Director of the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

Nisha has performed across Canada and the world, sharing her work on multiple tours and international features from Glasgow and Berlin to Seoul. She is also published in two chapbooks, Water and Limited Success. Her poetry speaks to themes of race, feminism, and identity, focusing strongly on her struggles and triumphs as a woman of colour. She strives to build strong relationships, mentorship, and opportunities for artists around her, believing in the possibility and forgiveness of the Edmonton arts scene. She is the former artist in residence at both The Sewing Machine Factory as well as The Nook Cafe.

We chatted with Nisha about her poetry, being appointed Poet Laureate, and what she has in store over her term.

Q: What most excites you about the role of Poet Laureate? A: I’m most excited to find new audiences to work with. It’s been exciting to be an artist in Edmonton because it’s a city that really allows you to experiment. I want to bring those new ideas to a wider audience with my new platform and really uplift people who might not have had the opportunity to access poetry or literary arts before. 

Q: What has your journey as a poet and an artist been like so far? A: I started writing almost five years ago when I graduated from the University of Alberta. I have a Bachelor of Commerce, not an arts degree. I spent a summer living on a First Nations reserve up north and I found the experience very moving and I started writing poetry while I was on this reserve. When I came back to Edmonton I looked for a community to share it with almost immediately because I really enjoy the social aspect of art. I found the Breath in Poetry Collective and started competing in poetry slams and I came up in the poetry slam community and now I’m writing and performing full time. 

Q: You’re the new Executive Director of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. Why was that opportunity exciting to you? A: I love event planning and on the best and worst days I’m the person who gets to give opportunities to poets to have their work heard. This is one of the best jobs you can have in the poetry world. 

Q: What are some projects you’re hoping to take on as Poet Laureate? A: I want to invest quite a bit of time into mentorship. Mentorship is something this city thrives on in the business community, and I think we should treat art the same way. Art is work, art is a commitment people have made, and we should honour that by offering them the same opportunities for development as we would any other profession. I’m also excited to have deep learning workshops and hosting them both in-person and online to reduce any barriers to entry so that anyone who is serious about improving their craft can really access those opportunities. I’m also just excited to perform for new audiences in the city. 

Q: You had done a mentorship residency at The Nook earlier this year, can you share more about that? A: Having a residency in a physical location that the public frequented meant that that location became a place for our profession. Poets started treating The Nook as a place to gather as a side effect of my residency there, so more people started to frequent The Nook as a business and as a performance venue in the city and that’s helped to establish a reputation for The Nook. Personally, it helped me grow very, very quickly into a role where I teach others. 

Q: Your chapbook, Limited Success, is in its second printing. How has your work evolved since its publication? A: I called it Limited Success because when it was published (May 2018) I felt like I had achieved a limited amount of success but I was still really happy with the amount of progress I had made. It was also a farewell to a style of writing I had become really comfortable with. Since then my work has evolved to take on very deep and complicated meditations on the stories of my life and the topics that I encounter every day. Themes like being queer or being a person of colour or being an immigrant now take on additional layers of complexity that I hadn’t been able to explore through the medium of spoken word before. 

Q: How would you describe Edmonton’s arts community? A: The Edmonton arts and poetry communities are so forgiving, if you have an idea and you want to go through with it and it doesn’t work out, there’s always an opportunity to try something else or try again. I find in other arts communities there can be a lot of competition, but Edmonton is a community that really wants to grow together and pull everyone up along with them so you’re not leaving anyone behind. 

Calder Community Mosaic from the forecourt of Calder Library - photo, Spacemakeplace Design

Lustrous and luscious, the Calder Community Mosaic’s triangular tiles invite touch. More than 7,500 custom-cut glass tiles converge into a myriad of shapes – diamonds, lines, stars, circles, spirals, and zigzags to communicate the community’s diversity and history. Interspersed throughout are references to the old railroad spur that ran through the neighbourhood, hints of traditional patterns and textiles, and the natural landscape. Created for the brand-new Calder Library’s Community Room by Vancouver-based collective, Spacemakeplace Design – aka Rebecca Bayer & David Gregory – the artwork took almost two years and a lot of community consultation to realize.

Coming from fine arts and architecture backgrounds, Rebecca Bayer says the Call to Canadian artists, issued in 2015, sparked the duo’s interest. “There are some common themes in our work – trying to speak to things coming together, interconnections between people and place. This mosaic is a different version of a project we had worked on in the past - a floor for a new Community Centre that incorporated patterns from that community. We worked with the City of Richmond archives to research patterns from groups of people who have lived in the area since long ago and those who are now also settled there. For the Calder project, we wanted to zoom further in and find a way to weave together individual input from present-day community, so we proposed a series of pattern-making workshops with various community groups where each person could potentially add their own piece to this multifaceted puzzle.”

Artist Rebecca Bayer with a young participant at Al Rashid Mosque workshop - photo, Spacemakeplace Design

Last year, with the generous assistance of various community liaisons, the artists visited the Africa Centre, Al Rashid Mosque, North West Edmonton Seniors Centre, the Grade 5&6 classes at Calder School, Edmonton Aboriginal Seniors Centre, and the existing Calder Library. “There was no set pattern agenda - we had a huge folder full of examples from around the world that everyone was welcome to look through - people were asked to get inspired and just create whatever came to mind within the provided equilateral triangle grid.  We had a couple of pattern-making options available – they could fill in a larger template grid with coloured cardboard tiles; or they could fill in a smaller grid using pencil crayons. More than 200 people - all ages, from 3 or 4 to seniors, came out. It was fun to meet people from the community.”

Art making at Edmonton Aboriginal Seniors Centre - photo, Spacemakeplace Design

When a diverse group gets together, sharing and storytelling happen. Rebecca says at least one bit of history made it into the bottom left hand corner of the mosaic. “one of the women from the senior centre was telling us about how the Calder community developed around the infrastructure of the railway. She wrote out one of the stories for us, and created a pattern of green and brown stripes that represents the old rails.”

Detail of the mosaic showing the green and brown lines - photo, Edmonton Arts Council

Like a community, the individual voices have entwined into a cohesive, albeit vibrant, identity. “It’s a woven gestalt idea – taking lots of little patterns with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, so we tried to weave them together so they flow in and out of each other,” explains David Gregory.

“We collected 250 patterns through the workshops.  Each was documented, translated into a digital format then imported into the Illustrator program where we could layer everything. We had 250 layers in the Illustrator file so we could play with things going on top or behind. It was a long process. This final artwork is version is Z-12. We went through the entire alphabet A-Z and then kept going!”

Detail of the mosaic - photo, Edmonton Arts Council

Listening to the artists talk about the intricacies of graphics programs, one can automatically think “21st century digital art” instead of “ancient medium”. Rebecca says the appeal is timeless and relevant to this space. “Mosaic has a long, long history of being used by many cultures in public spaces – we are trying to create a contemporary project using a traditional medium. Mosaics can last for thousands of years and it’s nice to think that this artwork might be around for a long time. With this kind of glass, the images will never fade, the colours and the material are both strong. In a space like a library, where people are supposed to be curious, you want them to touch the art so it can’t be too fragile or precious.”

Each element from tile shape to colours, is carefully considered, she says. “The triangle represents strength – if you’re building, the triangle is the strongest shape you can use, so that idea of strength is important. Colour choices were inspired by the Alberta landscape – they represent the sky and the landscape through the seasons.”

Mosaic detail showing mirrored tiles - photo, Edmonton Arts Council

Alberta’s bitterly cold days are represented through glittering mirrored tiles scattered throughout the mural. “We definitely wanted to represent ice and winter! However, the tiles also reflect light depending on the day or time of year. Symbolically, and practically they also reflect the neighbourhood. When you are looking at the mosaic, you are also part of it because of the reflective portions. Individuals can stand in front and actively be part of it.”

The finished mosaic - photo, Spacemakeplace Design