The 91-year-old CEO of the Commonwealth did not deem 2016 another annus horribilis but it was one for the political history books.
 
It seems only fitting that these dark days broken up by unfathomable acts of insanity have unfolded in this part of the watery world against the backdrop of a record-breaking dark, bitter-cold West Coast winter and freak snowstorms followed by the soggiest spring in memory.
 
We need to get out from under the sky booming with construction cranes, beyond the billboards promising freedom through technological mobility, away from the toys that hold what American social critic Chris Hedges calls the mind-numbing pop-culture “spectacle” that distracts us from understanding the pretty heavy political reality in his country and the world at large.
 
What we need now is to get outside and breathe in all the evidence that shows that from destruction and turmoil inevitably sprouts new life, new understandings and revelations. It’s there in the cracks of the sidewalk or the muddy tracks of machinery, and in our own devastated hearts: renewal.
 
The natural world gives us hope. After a long winter of discomfort and disbelief we are no longer asleep at the wheel, no longer assuming, reacting or over-reacting. We are thawing out and waking up.
 
We are becoming.

Playing with mainly found materials, and whenever possible with other people, offers me the chance to learn about properties and potential of those throw-away materials as well as about collaborative problem-solving and new/old modes of social interaction. I try not to overthink that link between materials and the inherent social nature of our species but just go with the urge to make the connections.

Working with cob – natural concrete that uses clay, sand and straw – provides a glimpse of an alternative to the inevitable glass-tower existence, the reliance on fossil fuels and the hazardous extraction and distribution process.

There’s nothing like bunker fuel hitting the local beaches or the growing Pacific trash vortex not so far away from those freighters to inspire alternatives. The solutions to these problems require alternative thinking, which depends on playing with ideas.

I got that first glimpse in a two-week cob-house-building workshop in the forest atop a Gulf Island, just days after I closed the door on my office job at a city newspaper. It was a tough adjustment, moving from a hierarchical corporate media culture to a loose, collaborative course-movement. 

By day I hauled boulders and danced the sand into the clay with the Mud Girls, the kind of people I had never cross paths with in a Vancouver editorial department. By night I slept alone in a tent on a mossy outcrop. 

How was it? my friends asked after I returned. "Wild" was the only way I could describe this foreign experience. 

Ten years later, I’ve been aching to dig my hands back into that feeling of the possibility of building something out of nothing, with others, testing our physical strength and forging connections with others who have a line on a local source for our materials.

The project is a cob oven, on a Gulf Island. The goal is to bake a pizza by the end of the summer.

Phase 1 is complete: creating a solid foundation for the oven. This is essential for protecting the cob from the Wet Coast climate.

The first two days were all about excavation. I hacked through thick salal root and hauled out bucket after bucket of compressed silt aggregate. The kids were eager to get into the act of shoveling the dirt onto the screen, then pouring water through the screen until just the rocks remained. I laid down some found French drain then back-filled with the gravel and stones until the site was pretty much level.

Next up: Building a dry-stack stone foundation – with a little help from my friends. Stay tuned.

Actually, I had no particular idea in mind; only quite a bit of wonder at the quantity of the stuff. After dragging great hunks of it back to the deck, I started to play. I organized the stuff into visual categories, and soon I was winding the tendrils into a skein, and slicing the bulbs into vessels. Some experiments were left in the elements and others brought indoors to desiccate (and hopefully not moulder and go rank).
Will my 20-pound giant ball shrivel up and break apart? Will the vessels turn into leathery cups? Time will tell and failure will be a teacher. 

In the meantime, I turn to the research portion of this playing with materials which leads to playing with ideas.

No surprise this high-tensile, miraculously durable, bouncy stuff has had many practical uses since ancient times.

The first nations of New Zealand called it Rimurapa, and cut into the honey-comb-like walls of the blades to create bags — Poha — to preserve and cook their harvests of muttonbird, an oily shorebird. Or they cut slits in the bags, filled them with shellfish, starfish and abalone, then tossed them in the water to seed coastal areas. Or they attached two inflated pohas and used them as water-wings in strong currents. Or lined woven reed hulls to make super-buoyant Zodiac-type vessels. The first nations in these parts transported oolichan oil.

That's all before listing all the nutritional attributes, and there was plenty of play in that bull kelp too. The high concentration of alginate makes the material a natural rubber ball.

If you image-search "use for kelp" you're hit with a barrage of ideas for thick rings of pickle recipes and a lot of crafty ways with kelp.

Among the fascinating findings are the Seattle area sound performance artist Suzie Kozawa, who makes wind instruments from bull kelp; and Everett, Washington fiber artist Jan Hopkins who combines bull kelp with sturgeon skin and other materials in her conceptual vessels.

But the beauty of the google-search is finding what you're not looking for, the unintended learning. That happened when I came across American artist/designer/maker Scott Constable and his manifesto-in-the-making of  ‘exuberant frugality’ (fine video in that link) that defines what he calls Deep Craft, based on the principles of deep ecology. Like Constable, I am intrigued by the inherent qualities of bull kelp and am still playing with how to make the most of those characteristics. He is thinking about bronze-casting the bulb and thick stem portions as furniture legs. I will stick to the meditative motions that will grow the kelp skein while keeping me thinking.

This week marks the unveiling of Golden Tree, Douglas Coupland's latest public artwork, to be installed next year at the southern gateway to Vancouver, at Cambie and Marine Drive.

The gold-patina, steel-reinforced resin and fiberglass mirror image of the famous hollow tree in Stanley Park will stand in front of a billboard-sized image of Stanley Park forest at the entrance to an Intracorp condo tower complex.

And already the tongues are wagging. 

This is when the art is working, when people are a little alarmed at the materials, the placement, the meaning. If art is a conversation with many often conflicting viewpoints, public artwork connects directly to the public. We not only have the opportunity to weigh in; we have the right.

So I'm weighing here on Golden Tree: Love, love, love.  A respected colleague suggested I was drinking the Coupland Kool-Aid. So I had to think about that. Am I too close to the artist to form a critique? What exactly has me digging the blingy dead tree-thing?

For the record, unlike Coupland, I was not in the 'for' camp for propping up the dead tree-thing in Stanley Park, or, at least in the way it was done (see video clip below on the story behind the prop-up project). I could not understand the panic around the parks board's news that the rotted, leaning partial carcass would have to go back to nourishing the forest floor. To quell the knee-jerk public outcry, the shell-fragment has been stabilized with concrete and steel. So now we have fake tree-thing, with all the artistic integrity of a movie prop or Disney street-furniture, and I'm sure the tourists love it. 

There had to be a better way to remember that scrap of a giant relic of the last stand of old growth forest that has been replaced by a dense forest of glass, concrete and steel. And now we have it, incongruously situated in the newest area of condo-tower densification, the gold evoking (to me, at least) festishization of an object, or our view of the ancient temperate rainforest seen through gold-coloured glasses as we glide by on the Canada Line.

I like the idea that the title necessarily includes 'tree' because this sculpture's connection to tree-ness is tenuous, sort of like someone's stuffed dead pet cat, now with marble eyes and in regal pose for all eternity. The title could have been This is Not A Tree, evoking Belgian surrealist artist Magritte's The Treachery of Images work, specifically his Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is Not A Pipe) that is in fact not a pipe but a painting of a pipe. 

From a working-artist viewpoint, Golden Tree, like Coupland's Infinite Tire, ingeniously walks that fine line between creating a work that will be approved by the private developer but that doesn't pander to that payer. Its form, placement and materials deny a single meaning, reflecting these shifting, tenuous times. It could have easily been included in The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas at the Smithsonian for its powerful subtext. (Hear more about the power of uncertainty in sculpture in this podcast interview with Hirshhorn museum curator Anne Ellegood.)

Now that we have a powerful tribute to the last "standing" giant conifer in the downtown area, perhaps we can let the original go the way nature intended, helping ensure the future of the city's lungs in Stanley Park.

I so adore this old World War I royalty-free poster created for the Canada Food Board that I post it in my kitchen every year during the putting-food-by months, already underway.

I love the displayed array of fresh produce that would never be pushed by a private enterprise (where's the profit margins in stuff you can grow?) and the chief goals of saving and not wasting. So anti-capitalist. There's nary a scrap of the patriarchy in this national call to action. You want to live well? Listen to what your grandmother's got to say, girl, and you'll be wanting not. 

It's propaganda art you can really sink your teeth into.

There's an art to putting food by without relying on electricity, and an art to harvesting what's wilding in your environment, also known as foraging. We do it with intention (in jeans and long-sleeved shirts, with hook, snips, and yogurt containers) or without intention (leaning one's barely clad beach-bound body into the thicket for a few juicy morsels). 

We are not wanting for blackberries in this corner of the world, to put by, or put in a pie — and not just for the fruit. In what should become an extension of this very Vancouver (and Vancouver Island) activity, the ubiquitous rogue species of Himalayan blackberry can be harvested for their durable 'vegetable leather.'

The time of this writing is the perfect time to reap a particular harvest, according to local artist
Sharon Kallis. It's late enough in the growing season for the canes to reach the thickness of a baby's arm and shoot 10 feet in the air in search for cyclists to take down or paths to take over. But it's not so late in the season that the menacing-looking vines are too woody to be able to be stripped. That hits around mid-August.

Why would want to strip the canes? It's a rhetorical question for anyone who likes to make something out of nothing, and this is even better: make stuff, while hacking into this invasive species' ability to turn diverse urban woodlands into a thorny monocrop.

Kallis, whose special interest is in social engagement, shows how to strip blackberry vines (or watch this video) to wrestle down this barbed invader and amass some very usable material that can be used immediately or stored for later to make useful things like baskets or privacy screens, and useless, more interesting things like installations. Some inspiration from the prolific American sculptor Patrick Dougherty:

It's probably more Little House on the Prairie than the slightly unsettling modern survivalist culture that has me generally pre-occupied with designs for off-the-grid living, untethered to hydro heating and water, sewer or gas-powered systems. My video porn serves up ways to create refrigeration through vacuum using two terra cotta pots (pant! pant!) or water-heating that involves a load of decomposing wood chips (yeah, baby!)

Despite the innovation boom in solar-cel technology and wind-harnassing gizmos, my interest is in the very basic of off-the-grid technology that might pop up on great websites like instructables.com. and Mother Earth News. I like the old ways that are not just another consumer market category, but involves easily located materials and uncomplicated DIY methods.

But it often takes weeding through all the newest technology to get to that simple design solution. For example, a while back I was rolling around one particular design challenge in my head: how to keep a supply of juice for a couple of weeks, without the aid of refrigeration and without fear of spoilage. Also, the juice should be packaged in single-serving, durable and recyclable containers for easy transport. After rejecting various ideas that involved TetraPaks and vacuum processes I realized I was talking about an orange.

The best designs are the ones that have been served up by Mother Nature that fit not coincidentally with our particular needs or have stood the test of time — a long time. The orange lesson came back to me over the last couple of weeks as I was banging cedar shingles into the side of a cabin in the traditional method, using only a hammer, knife and a block plane.  The "field" is composed of randomly staggered shingles laid out in courses with quarter-inch gaps to account for shrinkage and expansion from severe elements. The water naturally follows the vertical grain of the shingles, which are traditionally fairly easy to cut with a wedge from a cedar log. The courses overlap like fish scales, sloughing water away from the structure and the bottom double course creates an attractive flange that further directs water outwards. The additive fabrication process is not unlike other fibre-based work like knitting and quilting, requiring only the ability to measure and keep count and some stick-to-it-ness. It's relaxing, almost meditative work that doesn't require brawn or big machines. It's one of the cheapest cladding materials but the most expensive option due to labour costs, so it fits with my personal sensibility that is very much about the often hidden value of meditative labour.

Great design is not only a perfect marriage of form and function but is also about the body-friendly process, the longevity of that design, the ease of maintenance and repair, and the upcycling potential of those materials after they have fulfilled their use. And that's why wood shingling has been around since the 17th Century, but probably has been used on roofs and walls in very early dwellings, and why it's considered an art form.