Land in a Box

Imagining changes in the land over time

Sep 26, 2023

Vera and I are introducing some of the elements of our installation at the View from the Edge of the World (Art Gallery of Regina), especially for those of you who can’t attend the exhibit. This week I want to tell you about Land in a Box, as well as explore the role that creativity and collaboration played in its making. (Our exhibit closes October 22, 2023.)

Recently, I listened to a delightful young woman explain “big talk”. Instead of small talk, big talk hits you right away with a big question – something like Where do your ideas come from? How do you get ideas for the things that you do, whatever they are? What gets your engines turning?

I am fascinated by how ideas come to people, and so this is where I want to start as I tell you about Land in a Box. My ideas come in a few different ways. Often, I get a niggle, or as Vera would say a” scratch that needs to be itched”. It might begin with an image or phrase or something I want to know more about – but this “niggle” won't let me be until I give it some attention. Other times, I puzzle and ponder, immersing myself in a dilemma or a question. I wake up some morning, maybe weeks later, and an idea related to this tangle of thoughts presents itself. This latter example is what happened in the case of Land in a Box.

Vera got me started on this particular puzzling and pondering. Early in our collaboration, I took her to see what our family calls the “Corner of the Missing Trees”.

"The Corner of the Missing Trees." Left: What Vera saw ... Right: the missing trees

You can see it in the photo above. I showed Vera how there had once been two aspen bluffs, one on each side of the road. I shared how one of the bluffs had been bulldozed along with five other similar bluffs and every other patch of wild on that quarter section. How sad our family felt about its loss. How we were reminded of the missing trees every spring when the road and area where the trees had grown flooded. How we missed the yellow lady slippers, the hawks, and other creatures who took shelter in the aspens.

Vera looked at this lonely stand of trees, and said, “When I look at that, it means nothing to me.” This jolted me awake. It also made total sense. Most people who drove past the group of trees wouldn’t blink an eye. They never knew what had been there. So much has disappeared that we don’t even know about.

Vera’s observation wouldn’t leave me alone. It connected with something my husband Shane said: while we despair about all the wild patches of land currently being bulldozed, this is not a new thing. Indeed, his father and his grandfather had likely done the same thing – albeit with smaller machinery and on a much smaller scale. As settlers, we have been getting rid of what is wild or what is getting in the way of “progress” since we arrived. What did the place I call home used to look like? I puzzled about how we could acknowledge what has disappeared on the land over the years.

Enter Land in a Box - a way I could show the changes in the land over time. The title is ironic because you can’t really put land in a box. The blocks in the box (see photo below) represent the Dominion Land Survey System’s attempt to organize the land in a grid (or many boxes!) Each block is a quarter section (160 acres). Together, the four blocks represent a section of land (640 acres). The box is an interactive piece - I imagined children (and adults) taking the blocks out, turning them over, playing with them, and putting them back in the box again. What is more fun than opening a mysterious box, especially one with a handle on it!? (Have box, can travel!)

When the idea came, I sketched it out to show local wood artist Brian Baggett, and together we came up with something workable. Brian carefully crafted the most beautiful box, so beautiful that I worried about covering it with paint. I admired it for a long time.

Brian Baggett with the completed box and blocks in his studio

Eventually, I began painting, using aerial photos as I came to know the land around our farm in a new and different way.

July 2022 - A Wet Year

When you first open the box, this is what you see. 2022 was a wet year and canola (the yellow) grew for miles around us. My husband and I rent out the top two quarters of land where our farm (Kerry Farm) is located. A graveled grid road separates us from the bottom two quarters which are owned by others. Around our farm yard, you can see a dugout, some pasture land, and a small garden. On the bottom half, the two curved green lines are drainage ditches dug in the sixties to help drain surrounding wetlands more quickly so that seeding can be started as early as possible. (Some readers of this blog know that I have spent lots of time in the wetlands and shelterbelt across the road which is pictured here.)

July 1946 - A Very Dry Year

Turn the blocks over, and this is what you see: the same area in the dry year of 1946, as I imagined it - based on both aerial photos and the observations of my husband Shane and my friend Debra. The oldest aerial photos I could locate were for 1946. Because 1946 was so dry, the wetlands are smaller than in 2022. Notice how many more wetlands there were in 1946, as compared to 2022. Summer fallow (the brown soil) was often used to let the land rest between crops and has now been largely replaced by continuous cropping to stop the soil from blowing away. If you look at our farm yard, you will see that the garden is about 10x larger and that there is more pasture land (for both horses and cattle) which leads out to two wetlands. The dirt road runs around our dugout/slough rather than right through it as in 2022. The fields are seeded in much smaller portions.

Pre 1870 - A Wet Year

Take all the blocks out of the box, and this is what you see. Using the position of the sloughs from 1946 and imagining a wet summer before 1870, this piece of land might have looked something like this. However, if a prairie fire (common before settlement) had gone through, the area would look very different. In earlier days, buffalo grazed here. I imagine many rocks of all sizes. I imagine the air filled with birdsong. With no roads or field borders to stop me, my paintbrush made very different strokes than on the blocks. I could feel the gentle curves of the earth as I painted.

Collaborating

Land in a Box also got me thinking about all of the possibilities a collaboration can offer. Certainly, if Vera and I had each explored this subject separately, you would see two very different installations than the one we put together as a unit. There would be no Land in a Box, for example, because there would have been no conversation to get those particular engines rolling.

When two people focus their hearts and minds on the same subject, collaboration comes in myriads of ways – in conversations, in disagreements, in the questions we ask each other. Because each of us comes to the land with our own sets of assumptions, beliefs, and stories, we experience the same land in vastly different ways. These differences subtly affect every aspect of a collaboration.

When we were inspired by individual pursuits, we had the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other, and support and encourage the other to follow her inspiration.

There are also elements of our exhibit where our collaboration involved both of us working to put together one creative response – the floor mat, the table and chairs, the Heartbreak Station, and the overall layout of the installation are some examples.

And without a doubt, our own collaboration sparked so many other rich and valuable collaborations - many more than we can mention here. This is especially true of Land in a Box - Brian who built the box, the staff at Information Services Corp. and the National Air Photo Library, Shane, Debra, and artistic advisers Jessie and Tania, each of whom played an essential role in the making of the box.

Where will the frogs sing?

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