Keeper of Industrial Memory
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Keeper of Industrial Memory A Thesis Presented to NSCAD University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts by Angie Arsenault April 2017 Thesis Committee: Pam Ritchie, Professor, Craft Division (Program Advisor) Sandra Alfoldy, Professor, Art History & Critical Studies Division Thierry Delva, Associate Professor, Fine Art Division Chair Gary Markle, Professor, Craft Division Chair Jan Peacock, Professor, Media Arts (Director, MFA Program) Index I (T)Arcadia II In the field III Rust IV A note on material V Collection VI Postcards and Souvenirs VII Labour VIII Coal IX Keeper of Industrial Memory X Conclusion XI Storytelling Bibliography 1 I (T)Arcadia “Artists can make the connections visible. They can guide us through sensuous kinesthetic responses to topography, lead us from archeology and land based social history into alternative relationships to place...As envisionaries, artists should be able to provide a way to work against the dominant cultural dimensions of culture’s rapacious view of nature, reinstate the mythical and cultural dimensions of ‘public’ experience, and at the same time become conscious of the ideological relationships and historical constructions of place.” - Lucy Lippard1 "If history were past, history wouldn't matter. History is the present... You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history." - James Baldwin2 This is a story. This is a biography of a place. This is a historical document. This is an autobiographical account of a time and place from a particular point of view. Cape Breton, a small island on the most eastern edge of Canada, was once a Canadian industrial hub. As a people, Cape Bretoners hauled coal from the depths of the earth and used that fuel to make steel. For those reasons, it seems fitting and familiar to me that metal is one of my mediums of choice for my art practise. Another home. It’s in my blood. 1 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, (New York: New Press, 1997) p. 19. 2 I was introduced to this quote by James Baldwin during a presentation I attended given by Sylvia Hamilton at NSCAD University in January, 2017. It is from James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race, (Philadelphia & New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1971) p.188. 2 Industry and the lack of industry has shaped my existence. I was dreaming of dwindling fish stocks, moratoriums, deficits, closed factories and industrial ruins before I was even born. The Sydney steel plant has loomed large in my life. Its shadow was cast over my childhood: The view from the second story bathroom window of my parent’s house, the house I grew up in, the house my father grew up in, is out over the three houses that stood between our house and Louisa Playground, the train yard, the tar ponds and beyond that, slag mountain and the steel plant. Industry formed the very places we played - the playground I played on as a child was built on the by-products of steel making, a stone-like substance called slag - an island of slag floating in Muggah’s Creek, the notorious Tar Ponds. (Photo of Slag Mountain by Christina Arsenault, 2007) The train yard was also a sort of playground for us. We played on the tracks that carried coal from mines in Dominion, Glace Bay, and New Waterford. We were forbidden to enter the railyard, but it was adjacent to our playground, without even a chain link fence to keep us out. We snuck over as often as possible to leave pennies on the tracks, or to steal cherry bombs to place on the the rails, we were delighted by the explosion when the trains rolled over them. Directly across from slag mountain was a sinking barge next to the foundation of an old military hospital. The barge was half submerged, tied to a post with thick marine rope. We’d take turns leaping from the shore onto the tarred deck of the barge to peer down the hatch into the depths of sludgy, mysterious, black water. Were we seeking monsters, pirates, adventure, treasure? Children at play. We weren’t the first children fascinated with the carcass of dying industry. As a teenager, in the 1970s, my father and his friend, Jonathan Campbell, built a raft called Bitby from materials gleaned from scrapyards. They floated this raft in the tar ponds. Jonathan Campbell recounts the landscape where they floated Bitby in his 2009 novel, Tarcadia: “Slag Mountain is a treeless, shrubless, grey blind that blocks the city’s view of the steel-plant. It is one hundred feet high, a mile long, and nearly shear in its angle of ascent. The train marshalling yard, including the CNR roundhouse is directly across from Slag Mountain. The roundhouse and marshalling yard are on private industrial property built on a landfill. The landfill bulges out toward the steel plant side and hides the biggest part of the north tar pond from 3 anyone looking toward it from the Ferry Street causeway. There is no commercial or residential traffic near the pond, no access road, and very little CN activity on the back lines of the yards. With Slag Mountain on one side, and the industrial buffer of the rail yards on the other, the north tar pond is very private.” 3 I have a photograph from 1975 of my father and Jonathan standing on Bitby where she is moored across from Slag Mountain. It’s in the precise location the barge I played on as a child was moored. (My father, right, and Jonathan Campbell on their raft, Bitby, in 1975. Image courtesy of Doug Arsenault) In 1975 when my father and Jonathan Campbell were photographed on Bitby, the steel plant would have been in operation. When the steel plant was in operation, it belched orange smoke into the sky, filling it each evening. I can recall, once, during an evening walk along George 3 Jonathan Campbell, Tarcadia: A Novel. (Kentville, N.S.: Gaspereau, 2004) p. 83. 4 Street with my sister, Christina, falling to my knees, weak with laughter as she drily noted “it’s very orange out tonight”. It was. It always was. It was the colour of relative prosperity, not to mention environmental carnage. As a teenager, my friends and I walked the train tracks from the North End, where we lived, to our high school in Ashby every day. We walked past the Tar Ponds surrounded by chain link fence and “Human Health Hazard” signs every single day. The fence and signs were installed with our well-being in mind when I was already in my teenaged years. Sometimes we would make a remark about the sludge level, the number of shopping carts lodged in the sludge, or exchange a joke about the smell. Toxic waste was our norm, we interacted with it every day. It was not only a part of our landscape, but a part of our passing conversation and an unavoidable part of our daily life. 4 Growing up in the damaged economy of failing industry, I viewed an orange sky as a sign that there was work to be done. Employment depended upon it. Livelihood depended upon it. Orange meant sustenance. For this reason, slag, to me, represents a value laden stone remnant reflecting the unpleasant side of thriving industry, a reminder that flourishing industry, and the employment that it brings, often comes with a deep cost: coal dust sparkling like gems on the skin of children at the beach, rusted rebar and slag on the shore, industrial runoff sludging the streams. These are the grotesque souvenirs of industrial boom and bust and they are visible all over Cape Breton. 4 According to a mortality study ordered by Sydney’s Joint Action Group (JAG) in 1996 completed in 1998, the cancer rates in Sydney were 16% higher per capita than anywhere else in Canada. Tera Camus, Sydney Residents Dying Early: Doctors puzzled by problem, The Halifax Herald, Friday September 25, 1998 accessed March 4, 2017 (http://www.safecleanup.com/old_site/health925.html). 5 II IN THE FIELD The Abandoned Cannery On Thanksgiving Monday I walked down to the site where the abandoned cannery used to stand. I have visited this site any number of times throughout my life - it has always held a special draw for me and I’ve found its derelict and crumbling beauty inspiring over the years. This was my first visit to the site since the structure had been taken down in 2013. In the summer of 2011, my sister, Christina, and I walked down to the former cannery building. We scaled the hill and slipped through a break in the fence, ignoring the No Trespassing sign as always. Christina had her camera. She photographed the inside of the decaying structure of the cannery extensively, including a shot of me standing in the middle of the ruin; light filtering down through a hole in the ceiling, dust on the window panes, surrounded by corroded metal and general rubble. I am so glad we took those photographs that summer. By the following summer, in 2012, the building was already being dismantled. By 2013, the building was gone. The derelict structure of that cannery has always existed for me - throughout my entire existence it stood empty and full of the ghosts of industry. When I was a child we explored the building and the surrounding grounds extensively. I have fond childhood memories of leaping from the bank by the train tracks onto the roof of the building with a group of neighbourhood kids.