Out of catastrophe comes creative thinking

All the recent natural and unnatural disasters in this country — city-paralyzing changing-climate-induced floods in Calgary and then Toronto, an oil-tanker train disaster that derailed an entire Quebec town —  has left a lot of us here on the West Coast uneasy.

There’s an eerie calm here, a feeling like we may be next, despite the interception of a Canada Day plot of lethal destruction in our provincial capital. The regular warnings about the impending Big One is unnerving; even a walk on the seawall is a reminder that this will all be underwater, thanks to the 2012 CIty of Vancouver-commissioned public artwork by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky. The deceptively attractive blue stripes on the Cambie bridge pilings that is A False Creek serve as a shocking visual of what scientists are saying is the inevitable rise in sea levels due to global warming. We live in a safe corner of the world, but now we’re more likely to include the word ‘still’ in that statement.

I get that it’s important for art to alert the general public about the coming doom, but my kneejerk reaction is to shift my creative energy into survivalist mode. I seek out the handmakers and the innovators who are making plans for the worst and seeking out ways to move forward. It distracts me from thinking about my mother watching her near-sea-level living-room wash away in a storm.

I seek and find them on places like treehugger.com and instructables.com, where Wasillia, Alaska handygal Alaskan Tentlady (real name not posted) shares her step-by-step directions for making a Gertee (Mongolian for ‘relaxing at home’, as it turns out), a hand-built portable home for cold weather, made out of recycled materials. (Lately she’s been working on adapting this ancient and universally-used dwelling to house homeless teenagers in her region.)

Utility is a great foil for futility and this keeps bringing me back to tracking these innovators’ creative process. Their models are little labours of love made when their design was still in the dream phase, like Alaska TentLady’s 1:12 scale model of her alternative-dream home.

Vancouver Islanders Gord and Ann Baird also share their model of a cob house and living roof in their ultra-green cob house (below) at their blog that defies living with a heavy reliance on fossil fuels. The maquettes are exquisite sculptural works in themselves, made of pure heart, with no irony aftertaste.

Some high-end gallery curator should hunt down all the mini alternate-dream homes that their makers so generously share with the online world and put on one kick-ass show of hope.

Imagine the opening night: the cross-pollination of ideas and process, all these non-conformists who might balk at the label of artist collaborating with other likeminded people who are not simply awaiting the apocalypse but picturing the possibilities.