The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Ontario's Outdoor Art Gallery

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

The Haliburton Sculpture Forest, the largest sculpture forest in Ontario, is home to kilometres of paths bordered by artworks of all kinds. Visitors of all ages are welcome to engage with the works by touching, climbing, and enjoying nature and art free of charge.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I love watching people's reactions when they come to the sculpture for us for the first time, because you just know, like the first time you experience Christmas, like it's just this awe moment. You're not born an artist, you know, art is sort of something that you can learn, it's something that you can master. 300 years from now we're all gone and the forest has grown in, somebody's going to find that and think, what were these people doing, you know, hopefully they'll get to the idea that it was a sculpture gallery. People ask me what are we doing with this high heel shoe in the middle of a forest here. I said well, I just like to say that we're more than rocks and trees and lakes here in Halliburton.

We know how to step out on the town. The Halliburton Sculpture Forest is actually the best and the biggest and most unique sculpture forest in all of Ontario. I've been a friend of the Sculpture Forest ever since it started back in 2001 and even when I'm not working, I come here just to walk with friends or with my dog and it's a place that I never get tired of coming. When the Sculpture Forest first started, the group of people, Barb Olin and Jim Blake being the two people that really, really, really got this going, the goal was kind of to install one sculpture per year and they have far surpassed that. I was talking to

the Al McPherson who was the coordinator of the ecotourism program at Fleming College, and we were talking about places in the world that have done something like this, and he told me about the Griesdale Forest, which is in the Lake District in England, and that they had sculptures in their forest. So I went to England, actually stayed in the artist's residence, went out to see with the curator there, went out to see the sculptures in the forest. So we thought, okay, let's give this a try. Halliburton is known as a huge arts community now, but when I moved here there was one artist who lived in the community and he moved away about six months later. So it has been a very quick growth and it has worked extraordinarily well. In my career what I was was Dean of the College at the Halliburton School of the Arts campus

in Halliburton. And I see students every day who would come out to settle their mind, to get inspiration, and it's so wonderful to see people who are kind of stuck maybe in an art project that they're doing coming out and walking around and coming back and having the inspiration they need to go through with whatever it is that they're working on. This is Sculpture of Gellert by Mary Ann Barkhouse. It was named after Beth-Gellert, which is a village in Wales.

And the translation of Beth-Gellert is the grave of Galert. And the story goes that Galert was the faithful wolfhound of Prince Llewellyn, the last prince of free Wales. It's a very gruesome folktale where he thinks the dog has killed his baby son and he kills the dog. And this whole cautionary tale about humans' relationship with animals and it's also about how humans, other humans, as colonists do with First Nations people, Marianne's a First Nation artist. My name is Angelica Ingram,

and I work for the County of Halliburton as the manager of tourism. We get international guests all year round. I come here a lot with my children who love checking out the sculptures. The dome is one of their favourite ones because it's this really cool sphere with this hole in the ceiling that lets in this incredible amount of light. When you walk towards this sculpture, which is called Atmosphere, it looks like this big sphere of rocks has just fallen from the sky.

But as you make your way around to the other side you find out there's a door that leads inside the sculpture. The person who commissioned this sculpture, her idea was a secret space. And we take the ideas from the person who wants to commission it, we send a message to artists all across the country, they put in proposals, and then we choose one. And this one, one hands down, has a secret space within the woods. People love to come and sit in here.

This sculpture was created by John McKinnon, who's an artist from Nelson, BC. Our creed here is to make, there's not like a museum, more so just like a space for the art to sit. But there's a lot of story behind each of these things that doesn't get to be told, right? So we like to do free guided tours every Tuesday at 10, starting from July and ending in August. People with great in-depth art backgrounds come here to see the sculptures.

People that have never entered a museum love coming here as well. And one of the great things that I love as a tour guide is seeing the expression on people's faces when they first come up to a sculpture or when they hear the story behind the sculpture. You can just see there's a whole new world that opens up to them. The sculptures have been chosen so that people that opens up to them. And the sculptures have been chosen so that people can go up to them and be with them and climb on them and touch them and caress them. They get a true sense of what the sculpture

and the art is all about. People are very, very respectful of our outdoor sculptures. We've never had any problems with any vandalism and we have so many people that are friends of the sculpture forest. They'll phone us and they'll say, oh we we noticed that there's a branch leaning against one of the sculptures. So we have this incredible team in in the community that are guardians of the forest as well. You might go to soccer camp or you might go to hockey camp or something but in Halliburton as well. You might go to soccer camp, or you might go to hockey camp or something,

but in Halliburton, when you're young, you go to art camp. So people grow up with an understanding that artists are real people, they're not magic, they don't have special powers, they learn to do the techniques that they do. Some people are, you know, are born with a gift, other people learn that gift, but children need to know that artists and art you know, are born with a gift, other people learn that gift. But children

need to know that artists and art is something that can be with you your whole life. I have many favorite sculptures. When I retired there was money donated and usually would go to a scholarship when a manager retires within the college and I wanted a sculpture. So we have Fire and Ice, a really big shoe. There's a few of them that are like shaped like people. It does kind of feel like, you know, what do they get to do during the day when they're sleeping here alone on this rock

or another sculpture that we have embracing Eos. The sculpture is standing and facing due east and reaching up as if to embrace the dawn. And there's a goddess, a Greek goddess of the dawn whose name is Eos. In the myth of Eos, the dawn goddess, she was cursed by Aphrodite so that she would fall in love

with every young man she meets, which has got to be exhausting. Now one of the interesting things about this sculpture because it's all this this black wire is in the evening it just disappears into the background. So we've had a lot of people email or call or whatever and say where where did it racing Eos go? It's disappeared. It even gets us sometimes. Even I've looked at it and thought it's disappeared. One day, it was found with a Tim Hortons cup in one of its open hands.

And so that sort of created the story of he disappears at night to go get some Tim Hortons coffee so that he can be awake for the dawn when the Eos comes back. The wonderful part of it is just people experiencing the sculptures themselves, making their own stories. I think my favorite sculpture is Das Buch 23 by Marianne Rime. You don't see a whole lot of sculptures about books in particular.

Das Buch is a steel book with chainmail pages. It's empty, but emptiness is just a beginning, right? So it's like infinite possibility just from this empty book. On the cover, Marianne has put the Japanese kanji for book and then number 23, which represents that this is the 23rd book sculpture that she has made. And then on each each page of the book is a letter so you can read through it. N-I-N-E-S-S. So the book spells emptiness, which a lot of us with a Western view

see as a very sort of sad thing, it's like it's emptiness. But I was showing this to a Christian scholar who said, yes, but in the beginning there was nothing. Wow, I hadn't thought about it in that way. And then I was talking to a Buddhist priest. And she said, in Buddhism, we meditate to create the empty, to give space for things to come in. And I thought,

wow, I hadn't thought about it that way either. The book is empty, but it is full of meaning. I was at the college for 36 years in the capacity as Dean and the over that time we went from short workshops to week-long courses in the summer, and we would have about 3,200 registrations in the summertime. So over the years, we started offering full-time programs, so young people coming into the community. And the biggest impact it's had, I think, is that lots of those people stay. Young people stay in Halliburton, they've been here for a year or two and they decide that they like it here. It's really nice that it

draws people of different ethnic groups and especially during COVID and during COVID it was one of the places you could go and have a walk outside, meet with your family. So we went from perhaps 10 or 12,000 visitors a year to about 30,000 visitors a year and now that that sort of level has maintained. Art should be available to everyone and one of the great things about the Helleburton Sculpture Forest is that it is free for everyone. We of course appreciate donations as always but it's just nice to be able to offer exposure to art to people of all ages. And we see so many

people come to this area to experience art, to create, to go to studios, to learn at the Halliburton School of Arts. We see so many people come for the Sculpture Forest and then discover so much more when they're here. There's so much economic impact in the arts in this community and I think people really realize that not only are the artists contributing, but people who are coming to appreciate the art are contributing. I would say there's a health and well-being investment and spinoff as well. Wow.