WATER / COLOUR draws on Williams’ practice of making watercolour paintings of natural and cultural encounters on Redonda and Cortes islands, where she has lived since the 1970s. She is a keen observer of the way that human events shape places, habits and objects, and vice versa, which informs her approach to making paintings as well as books, assemblages and installations of experiential research and collected materials. In the 1990s, her long-term investment in the mid-coast islands sharpened her focus on the historical and living imprint of Indigenous communities on the territory, as well as the influence and impact of early European explorers and settlers.

Williams exploration of Bute Inlet led to her exhibition High Slack at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology (1993/4) and the publication of High Slack: Waddington’s Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (1996). Through this project, she developed a methodology of “poetic archeology”, which informed her artistic practice and the research and writing of four more books about the region: Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs, 1893–1998 (2001), Dynamite Stories (2003), Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast (2006), and Cougar Companions: Bute Inlet Country and the Legendary Schnarrs (2019).

Cougar Companions emerged following Williams’ introduction to Bute Wax, a beguiling substance that intermittently and inexplicably emerges in Bute’s waters. She was gifted a jar of the wax that was collected in the 1920s by the Schnarr family, who were early settlers in the inlet, and it is featured in WATER / COLOUR. As Williams collected water, she encountered oral and material data about cultural, geological and marine phenomena like the wax. This led her to explore stories from the Homalco Nation, historical settlers and current residents; as well as to research power projects from the 1920s to the present. In previous iterations of the exhibition, the investigative material she collected was presented in booklets and a display cabinet.

In 2021, Williams resumed gathering water after a significant landslide lurched down Elliot Creek into the Southgate River. The Homathko Icefield at the north end of the inlet––the third largest outside of the Arctic––was melting, and its recession exposed a large rock that separated from the mountain and fell into Elliot Lake, displacing a massive amount of fresh water, which in turn propelled the slide. The event was evidence that the inlet is threatened not only by industrial exploitation, but also by the rapid warming of the atmosphere.

Ronan Stewart also approaches steel with patience, inviting time itself to be a material in his process. His sculptures emerge one bead of molten MIG wire at a time. They accumulate like wax into forms that resemble the slow rise of stalagmites. These fragments are pruned and sutured together to form figures that echo the fragile posture of withering plants. In Stewart’s Husk (2025) series, the stability of steel confronts the ephemerality of flora, presenting an arrested encounter between what endures and what fades.

Mahsa Farzi is motivated by the liberatory potential of de-creation. Her installation Untamed (2025) draws together images and text from Persian miniature painting, folklore and literature. Farzi cuts limbs, orifices, sexual organs and flowers out of acrylic panels, to which she applies diluted metal paint which shocks the plastic, creating an etched and stained effect. She then works with a high-temperature propane torch that distorts and deforms the figures. Farzi’s process materializes the disorientation of cultural and ideological alienation, which slowly renders the world fragmented and unfamiliar. In her work, she explores the potential for release and renewal that this psychic and social erosion offers.

Evan McGraw’s calligraphic work is a ritual of precision and calculated experimentation. He plays with the visual and syllabic form of single words and short expressions in ways that unravel their legibility. Through repetition, letters drift, float, coil and dissolve. Ruin, Seraphic and Get Bent (2025) convey unique energetic states, expressing elegance, destruction and refusal. Repeating each word vocally is a form of incantation that both summons their energy and diffuses it.

Marcel Lessard also works with repetition. His graphite mosaics 1.31 (1 & 2) (2024) present iterations of two environments: the shoreline and an abstraction of space. He develops the compositions sequentially from the outside in, and each unit is a unique drawing that builds off of elements in the previous one. Lessard is interested in these two geographies as physical and psychological boundaries. He is curious about how the perception of each space is altered through reduction and reoccurrence.

In Shayne Weston Abbott-Arcan’s portfolio of sketches and drawings, the phenomenon of transfiguration frequently rears its head. Bodies of real and imagined animals are hyphenated or morph into one another. Some beings have anthropomorphic features, while others express qualities of a more-than-human spirit. For Abbott-Arcan, drawing was a means of wandering through his emotional and sensual experience of the world. He wasn’t afraid to explore the darkest corners of his encounters. In them, he often found a stray thread that led back to the light.

While riding, he liked to test my grip on the reins by sneaking bites of grass. I focused on maintaining gentle contact, enough to remind him I was there—although whether I was or not, I knew he would follow the pack. I never felt bad about robbing him of his roadside snacks, because in the off-hours he would be turned out to graze freely.

On a rest day, the horses lingered on a sandbar, their bodies relaxed and quiet, huddled together for protection. In the silhouette of the herd, I could make out close friends grooming and nuzzling each other. Free from the fetters of saddles and bridles, their demeanor suggested lazy bathers standing knee high in cool waters to best the Sunday heat. I reflected on learning to ride in stables that only turned out horses for short, sporadic periods, and how their resentment was palpable in the holes they had kicked through their stalls’ walls.

What began as an attempt to hold on to my memories, morphed into a story about two friends who peeled away from the pack after being set free to roam for the evening. In a tight span, the partners commiserate on work and comfort each other against all else. Much like ourselves, who, after the whistle blows, spend our evenings striving to reclaim our natural state only to be pulled back into the grind come sun up.

– Graham Landin, August 2024

Suárez works extensively with woodblock printmaking—a craft that he refers to as “composing in time.” He employs minimal sketching and develops images slowly, through an accretion of marks. His confidence in image-making was nurtured through his training in geometry and drafting, acquired during his time studying aeronautical engineering. Air currents and electromagnetism introduced Suárez to how disciplines such as meteorology and physics give structure and narrative to intangible phenomena. This experience piqued his interest in other cultural and linguistic traditions that seek to articulate the means and meaning of planetary origins and functions.

The sun—as the primary source of light and heat, a measure of time and a marker of place—features in origin stories (called cosmogonies) from around the world. The Mexica cosmogony of the five suns, for example, organizes time into five cycles of creation and destruction, ruled by five sun gods. We reside in the epoch of the fifth sun, governed by the war-like god Tōnatiuh, whose reign is motivated by movement and whose demise is predicted to be caused by earthquakes.

Our era is governed by science and rationalism. Though predicated on the notion of a “stable truth,” these melodic lines are no more resolute than those that preceded or parallel them. At the limits of technical perception and empirical reason is an edge that may open up onto other melodic lines, such as the echo of Tōnatiuh’s rage or Helios’s spells. Suárez’s matrices are the imaginal architectures(as Campagna calls artworks) that invite us to encounter existence at the limits of ocular vision, where a form of insight—perhaps akin to the omniscience of the sun— invites us to enter the magic of being.

The works in cover the taken bone are made with mediums found close at hand: primers and paints from the hardware store and industrial oils for machinery. Dunn works with repurposed brushes, tools and natural implements that have roles in other aspects of farm labour. Drawing from the impulses of arte povera, she seeks to work economically and directly with informal materials and procedures.

The visual narrative of the Pacific Northwest’s climate is cool and desaturated. When watched and felt closely, subtle variations in temperature and tonality reveal themselves. Dunn has an affinity for grisaille, or achromatic, painting and tempers her palette to reflect the muted atmosphere. She often paints on both sides of the canvas, creating a wet, saturated surface that reveals stains from the marks made on the obverse plane.

The region’s dampness and darkness accelerates decay, but also regeneration. Many of the paintings featured in the exhibition have been exposed to the weather and worked with natural matter such as soil, leaves, sand, gravel, bark mulch and straw. These processes imbue the works with traces of the seasonal events that accompany their emergence, becoming visual stories of  natural and social time. 

Notes: The exhibition borrows its title from Verne Bright’s poem “Good Soil,” published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, January 1936, 187, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=21083.

Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture” (1988), in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (Berkley, CA: Counterpoint, 2017), 102.