In our home city of Calgary/Mohkinstsis, we often occupy the gray and glimmering interspace between artists and organizers. Most Winters, we host The Hibernation Project, an annual intervention inviting friends & fellow artists to gather in the spirit of winter wildness to make art together. This is an ongoing collaboration, intended to combat seasonal isolation and loneliness through gentle productivity, experimentation, sharing, friendship, feasting, fire, and fun.
Photos of various Hibernation Project events, as captured by Mike Tan, Jared Sych, and Caitlind Brown
In 2024, The Hibernation Project included a slow dance, multiple feasts, a public access TV station, DIY tobogganing, a live-to-tape broadcast of our monthly sound art radio program, and much more. You can read about all The Hibernation Project events on our dedicated blog, here.
One of our highlights of The Hibernation Project 2024 was GATHER BY FIRE, a 5-day residency and ritual sculpture burn we co-organized with Marnie Temple & James Wallis at Empire of Dirt.
A frame from Veronica Verkley’s fiery animation, “you’ll never know, deer, how much I love you”
Every year, The Hibernation Project hosts a sculpture burn in tribute to our late friend & artist Matthew Mark Bourree. Participants build sculptures out of wood or paper, and burn them in a communal ritual combating the cold, dark Winter and calling for the relief of Spring.
Last year, The Hibernation Project was invited to host GATHER BY FIRE at Empire of Dirt, located on Arrow Mountain overlooking Creston, British Columbia on the traditional territory of the Ktunaxa people. This felt like an opportunity to expand the experiment in an act of collective research-creation, building larger and wilder sculptures than ever before. Participating artists were invited to dilate the sculptural scale of GATHER BY FIRE, working with materials and outdoor spaces onsite, and responding to concepts related to wildfire in the Kootenays.
ARTISTS:
Elaine Weryshko
James Wallis
Larry McDowell
Lisa Benschop
Marnie Temple
Nikki Emerson
Palmer Olson
Veronica Verkley
Wayne Garrett
Caitlind r.c. Brown
Hearkening to primal relationships, GATHER BY FIRE was named for an artwork by Sarah Smalik & Matthew Mark. The annual event speaks to the great and mystical magnetism of people towards light, heat, and each other.
While the rainy Winter weather at Empire of Dirt made it almost impossible to ignite any kind of fire (the opposite of the Summer season in the same place), the following artworks were created in the spirit of fire gathering…
Elaine Weryshko & Nikki Emerson
Pan with Us was a fire-lit shadow puppet performance by Elaine Weryshko & Nikki Emerson, inspired by Robert Frost’s poem of the same name. Responding to the myth of Pan, the forest creature, puppets were fastidiously cut out and constructed from branches, fruit, leaves, and other materials. A tribute to the serenity and destructive power of nature, Pan with Us culminated in an attempt to burn down the screen and all the sets – an attempt that was ironically thwarted by mischievous Winter rains (Pan at play?)
James Wallis
Candle Stack is a collaborative sculpture by Wayne Garrett & James Wallis. It is an iteration of Wayne’s Timbertown (2023).
The sculpture is of dual symbolic meaning. On the one hand, it represents the multicultural northern hemisphere’s tradition of preserving the light during the darkness of winter. On the other hand it is paradoxically a symbol of the burgeoning industrial revolution of the late 1700’s when smokestakes began crowding cityscapes across Europe, marking what has now become humankind’s dark contribution to climate change, catastrophe and mass extinction.
L.S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia
In a satellite fire event televised live to Empire of Dirt, the L.S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia (Lisa Benschop) and their permanent Artist-in-Residence, Larry McDowell, hosted a book fire. Lisa burned papers and blank record ledgers, previously spoiled by mold, and de-acquisitioned from the collection. Larry created the burning vessel and sacrificed a ruined copy of the God Emperor of Dune. Ashes may or may not be used to create inks or other drawing materials.
Marnie Temple
until we meet again is a performative fire sculpture by Marnie Temple. In her words, “After ten years of this stick sculpture being neglected and forgotten, it finally found its expression at Gather by Fire. I spent a day preparing the ball of sticks and the process had me contemplate the ways in which we might neglect the people we love, so that they become part of a landscape and go unnoticed. It was a moving moment for me when I watched the form light up and be given life for the last time.”
As a satellite part of this work, Marnie ignited mullein torches at the communal fire (inspired by Lane Shordee) and we carried the fire – along with a propane torch – to the suspended sculpture for ignition.
Palmer Olson
Palmer Olson was our writer-in-residence for GATHER BY FIRE at Empire of Dirt. He balanced his time between supporting other artists in the creation of their work, and developing new poetic prose with his armour-plated Olympia typewriter. On the night of the burn, he assembled a fragmented lectern and we gathered around the communal fire to hear a reading of several pieces. At the summary of the reading, Palmer unceremoniously removed his lectern, hacked it into bits, and fed it into the fire.
Palmer is working on a short piece about GATHER BY FIRE to share in written format, at a later date.
Veronica Verkley
you’ll never know, deer, how much I love you… is an installation of 5 deer figures running through the trees by Veronica Verkley. Constructed from tissue paper, tape, and wire, the artist was meditating on animals running for their lives from forest fires.
Veronica plans to cut video of the individual figures burning into an animation of one deer running while burning.
This was one of two projects Veronica made…
give up/ don’t give up is an oversized horse skull, meticulously patterned, modelled, and constructed by Veronica Verkley. Built from found materials including thick wax paper, cardboard, string, and charcoal, the skull draws from relationships between domestication, animals, and accidental fire. The sculpture was burned up in the dark of a rainy night.
Wayne Garrett
Fuel Fossil is a sculptural performance taking the form of a 90s pickup truck, engulfed in flames, laden with an illicit load of materials destined for dumping. Built from sawmill offcuts, and constructed for incineration, the piece aims to subvert the conventional relationship between fuel and it’s means of combustion, drawing a heavy-handed connection between vehicle use, global warming, pollution, nature, and our ever growing carbon footprints.
Wayne Garrett originally constructed the piece during the Summer at Empire of Dirt Residency. The piece was crushed by rain and snow. He reconstructed the piece for GATHER BY FIRE.
Caitlind r.c. Brown
cease/FIRE is a note from the present to the future, from the forest to the flame, from these lands to those (far away and on fire).
Created by Caitlind r.c. Brown, the piece is intended to be viewed in retrospect as a video, seen from the seasonal perspective of August (smoke season). cease/FIRE draws from the increasingly devastating risk of summertime wildfires in the Kootenays, while indicating international calls for a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
This is one of two pieces created by Caitlind for GATHER BY FIRE…
In-Growth was a suspended found forest sculpture, orchestrated by Caitlind Brown. The lichen-encrusted dead tree fell across the walking path at Empire of Dirt – one micro-world intersecting another. It was already a sculpture, a perfect composition, a creature alive with colour and latent energy. Floating in the fog, In-Growth reached in all directions like a curious synapse. Tiny matchstick growths began appearing, pink and nubby, planted by the artist as a trail of the dark potential for ignition (inate risks of deadfall during wildfire season).
On the rainy night of the sculpture burn, the piece would not light. But a dried tree full of matches could not be returned to the forest, and so it joined Wayne’s truck for its final hours.
Thank You
To the artists who participated in GATHER BY FIRE at Empire of Dirt! Thanks to Marnie & Jim for bringing us out for an expanded fire experiment, to the viewers who attended, the lands for holding us, and everyone who helped. 🖤 Thinking of Matthew Mark. Hope you were here in spirit, haunting the fog + fire.
Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett 