At Home: Talks with Canadian Artists about Place and Practice

By Lezli Rubin-Kunda

In this intimate investigation of the artistic process, Lezli Rubin-Kunda explores the nuanced path of creative work and the way artists make sense of home and place within their art practice and their lives. Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who examines these issues in her own work. But in this book, she expands her horizons, travelling across Canada to talk to more than fifty practicing artists, including Amalie Atkins, Aganetha Dyck, Francois Morelli, Simon Frank, and Sharon Alward, about their work, their creative process, and the place of "home": in their work.

What emerges from these thoughtful conversations are fascinating and unexpected orientations to place, ranging from deep connections to a specific childhood home, to more conscious adoptions of place, to somewhat fluid approaches in which the very concept of "home" seems to dissolve.

Moving from physical landscapes to the geography of memories and recorded histories, from territories of emotion to social environments that condition and contribute to the idea of home, Rubin-Kunda touches on indigenous approaches to ancestral homelands, the land as physical place and emotional territory, the historic role of women in creating and taking care of "home," ideas of home disconnected from place, and liberating concepts of "homelessness." Woven through these encounters with other artists are Rubin-Kunda’s reflections on her own artistic path.

Candid, empathetic, and insightful, At Home explores the creative process and the ways that artists find and create meaning within a fragmented contemporary landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: May 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781773100494

Lezli Rubin-Kunda

Lezli Rubin-Kunda is a Canadian-Israeli multidisciplinary artist whose work explores her relationship with her environment. She has exhibited and performed in the United States, Canada, Israel and Europe. She currently lives outside of Tel Aviv and teaches in the architecture faculty at the Technion University, Haifa, Israel.

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Israel

Introduction: Setting Out

In 2004 I created an installation, Reforestation (and a topography of longing), for a group show, Homesick, which took place in an artists’ studio in a dilapidated building in the old quarter of Tel Aviv. In the stairwell, the cracks in the peeling plaster walls reminded me of the maps of canoe routes through the lakes and forests of northern Ontario. Filled with a longing for those vast, untamed landscapes of my childhood, I colour in these shapes of lakes and rivers in blue. On the landing, under a projected image of Temagami Lake country and a recording of loons, wild birds whose calls echo back and forth through the stairwell, I plant a miniature forest. This forest, like many in Israel, is not at all like those I remember. Israel’s planned forests are made up of evergreens, not indigenous trees; not natural, but orderly, planted purposefully. Perhaps in this work I am attempting the seemingly impossible task of fusing the two landscapes, the two worlds where I feel at home. One is in Tel Aviv, Israel, to where I had moved more than thirty years ago, with its connections to my historical, cultural, and collective past. The other is northern Ontario, where I spent the summers of my childhood and adolescent years, and to where I return periodically.

This work, like others I have created since moving to Israel, was, in part, a way of coming to terms with my new environment, while at the same time allowing it to be informed by my Canadian past. Engaging directly with the materials and the spaces of my current location and carrying out actions that connect me in a down-to-earth manner to this place were strategies I used for finding a sense of belonging. Over time, I have come to realize how these activities as an artist had become a way of addressing a deep desire to feel grounded in a specific place, to feel at home in my surroundings.

Lezli Rubin-Kunda, Reforestation (and a topography of longing) (detail), 2004, installation, Herzl Street Studios, Tel Aviv, Israel

As my art developed and took form, I often wondered if this yearning was peculiar to me, or whether and to what extent its role as an impetus for art practice was shared by others. Is it specific to those who live far from their childhood home? Or perhaps it comes from being Canadian, from growing up in a land populated by so many immigrants? Could I find other Canadian artists, I asked myself, who also used their practice as a way to orient themselves to their surroundings, to find home?

It took me almost a decade after Reforestation to formulate and study this question more thoroughly. In 2012 I came to Canada to travel across the country and talk to other artists about these ideas.¹ Over a period of two years, I met with more than fifty artists, asking them about their life and art practice, investigating how their art related to my inquiry. I wanted to know how they worked in relation to their sense of home, how their art practice connected to the specific locales they chose to inhabit, and what relation their work had to their personal and collective past.

I moved from Canada many years ago, yet I never fully left. Over the years I have maintained a constant connection, returning periodically to visit family and friends, carry out site-specific art projects, and immerse myself in the landscape. I feel I still belong, in spirit if not as a resident, and it is therefore both as an insider and an outsider, from a place of intimacy as well as of distance, that I set out to explore the questions I posed.

In the course of my journey, I slipped back easily into my Canadian persona, feeling myself almost an integral part of the places, the stories, and the landscapes, and attuned to many of the cultural nuances. During my childhood and youth, I travelled across the Canadian continent by car and by plane, hitching and hiking. I walked in forests and canoed on lakes, visited Old World relatives in prairie towns, and was caught in blizzards and stranded on dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. I stood on the edge of the ocean or on top of a high mountain and, momentarily at least, felt that I understood my position in the universe. I was formed and informed by that sense of space and distance that is associated for me with living in Canada. And because I was young and starry-eyed, it was also in those wild and expansive places that I felt most alive, where life seemed most real and even, as I felt then, somehow morally purer. It was partly this youthful, simplified sense of being Canadian to which I now returned and which I needed to unravel and re-examine.

I headed off on this pilgrimage through Canada² with a sense of keen enthusiasm to revisit the places of my early life, to meet with and learn from artists, and to engage in an open, forthcoming conversation, all the while avoiding the pitfalls of theoretical discourse or art-world positioning that so often seem to me to stultify meaningful exchange.

My methodology in preparing this research was not systematic.³ I usually interviewed the artists in their homes or studios, but also in cafes or workplaces. I took only a cellphone, to record our discussions and to take the occasional photo. The artists were all extremely generous with their time and open in sharing their thoughts and their work. Each meeting had its own rhythm and dynamic, and our discussions did not always stay on track or strictly address the issues at hand. I listened, letting each person’s tales and reflections slowly unfold. Sometimes we went on long detours to cover different topics of interest, and occasionally the artists were interested in me and how my own art related to this study. But for the most part the focus was on them and their world.

After I had transcribed the interviews and reviewed all the materials I had gathered, I began to see a loose structure emerging. All the artists I met with have some notion of home and its relation to their art, ranging from a deep identification with a specific location, through a variety of looser connections, to a point where locale and home become fluid concepts or dissolve entirely. Each chapter deals with one particular approach along this continuum, focusing on one or more artists. The text includes many direct quotes from the interviews and photographs of the artists’ work. I chose to focus on twenty-six artists in some detail, as representative of different approaches. Others I have included more briefly, weaving relevant elements of their art and practice into the text. I have tried to rely as much as possible on what the artists chose to tell me. But when I felt important information was missing, I checked other sources or contacted the artists again. Many artists I interviewed are not included in the final book, but they all informed my thinking and enriched my overall understanding of the subject.

Most artists do not fit neatly into any one particular category. Each artist’s life and work are much more complex and intricate than my themed framework allows. By organizing the book this way, I do not mean to confine their activity to one channel or interpretation. And although the work of some of the artists has undoubtedly evolved since our encounter, I chose largely not to include or discuss more recent developments. I also chose not to deal with the complex and important question of how these artists finance their lives and their practice. I did however discover that many of them teach in art institutions and universities, and almost all of them rely at times on grants from the Canada Council and other arts agencies to fund their activity. Despite economic challenges, the artist’s viewpoint is in many ways a privileged one; artists have the freedom to determine, in part, their own schedule. They have tools and media for expression and a system, however problematic, for presenting their output to the world. Somehow, they survive and they create.

Artists are often outliers, critics of their own society and environment. They are good sensors; their antennae are long, their feelers highly activated. I discovered all these qualities in my encounters with the artists on this journey. In engaging in these discussions, I felt a connectedness, a kind of at home-ness with my fellow artists. I was in familiar territory, my uncomfortable comfort zone. I, like the others, have perceived the world in part through the filters of my art. And I have looked to art for ways to experience the world, to make sense of things, as a container for the contradictions and intricacies of being alive.

Although I did not emphasize the issue of nationality or address the topic of any distinct Canadian-ness, it is my hope that, from the details of each artist’s life, something uniquely Canadian will emerge. While their stories could be similar to those of contemporary artists in other countries, perhaps there is something Canadian in their specific options and locations, and the quality of the voice that emerges here. No more, but no less.

Any discussion of the issue of home and place in a post-colonial context needs to address the crucial, and until recently largely under-acknowledged and often ignored issue of the relationship between the Indigenous peoples of this land and those who settled in or immigrated to it, and their respective, interrelated perspectives on home, on belonging, on land. I have taken up this topic in several chapters in which I focus on the work of one Indigenous artist and of non-Indigenous artists for whom this is a central issue in their own art practice. I have also confronted, throughout the book, my own difficulties and challenges when faced with the complexity of parallel, though different, contentious issues of land in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. However, although it is certainly an area deserving of further inquiry and investigation, given the scope and nature of the book, this is not its principal focus.

Nor can the work claim to include the full range of Canadian artists and their experiences, such as Francophone artists and those from more recently arrived immigrant communities. Although such voices are heard in this book, it is perhaps a shortcoming of my research method that the book still tends to a largely Western-oriented, Anglophone perspective. A more exhaustive study would seek fuller representation of the concerns and practices of Indigenous artists as well as of artists from the many other groups that make up Canadian society. The topic is rich with possibility and opportunities for continuing exploration.

Essentially, then, this story is the record of my own particular journey, with my subjective choices, insights, observations, and blinders. I approach the questions I posed not as a scholar or an expert but as a working artist, with all the advantages and disadvantages of this position. Although there has been a great deal of writing on place and home in different academic disciplines, I have largely avoided theoretical concepts or discussions and limited myself to my lived experience, to the views expressed by the artists, and to my reflections on them. The text developed from what I learned from the artists themselves, their own thoughts and innate understanding, with all their richness and limitations.

The very meaning of word home is burdened with stale romanticism and nostalgia, and its use is rife with clichés. It appears in many different contexts, from feminist psychology, architectural theory, and humanist geography to political jargon and right-wing populism. So overused is it that it can seem almost devoid of content. It is also worth asking whether this topic is not somewhat archaic today. In earlier times art had strong sacred connections to place. Art and place, religion and culture, everything was local and place-bound. But now? International travel and the Internet enable artists to be connected everywhere and nowhere, and many are able to adapt to a dizzying array of new and changing environments. How can notions of home and place still be relevant?

Nevertheless, for me, despite its misuse and abuse, the notion of home has been a critical organizing concept, a beacon, a driving force for my dreams and my art activity over many years. After my discussions with Canadian artists, I came to realize that, in different ways, it still holds strong significance for many of them as well.

The book is framed partly as a personal pilgrimage, a quest to answer the questions I posed. Each interview raised issues on which I reflect. In the course of my encounters, feelings of identification or discomfort arose, confrontations with some of my own attitudes to home and land, both in Canada and in Israel, my adopted homeland. These reactions were all part of the raw data, and I bring in some of these deliberations, as well as works or thoughts of my own where I feel they might be relevant to the questions raised. And at the end of the journey, in the afterword, I look back and reflect on what I have learned from my journey and from the artists I met.

Inevitably, then, this book, though looking at other artists, is also about me and my own art. So before launching into my encounters, I begin with my own story, and I trace the development of my search, through my art, for a sense of home.

1 For this project, I received a grant through the Canadian Studies program. This was an agency that existed for many years in different countries to promote the study of Canadian topics at universities abroad, but it has since been closed down. It was administered in Israel through the Israel Association for Canadian Studies.

2 The first leg of my journey was in the early autumn of 2012, when I visited Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal, and Halifax. In the winter of 2013 I returned and visited cities in the Prairie provinces – Lethbridge, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg. I had originally envisioned meeting artists in all parts of the country, but ultimately I stayed in the larger cities, where most artists seem to live these days, regardless of where they are from originally.

3 It was ordered according to my own intuition and serendipitous encounters (a method I found out later is known in the more scientific research methods literature as snowballing). I sent out my proposed study to a wide range of people in the Canadian art world, asked for recommendations from artists and gallery owners, and perused exhibitions online. Timing, chance, and the availability of the artists were all factors.

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Locating and Re-locating

How did I come to this deep interest in place, in home? Looking back, it seems to have been with me for as long as I can remember. If asked to recall a vivid place memory from my childhood, it might be the dam I built on my street:

I am eight or nine years old, and it is late afternoon on a cold March day in Toronto. School is over for the day, and I’m walking home from the bus stop along a residential street. There’s a touch of spring in the air, and the mounds of dirty snow have begun to melt. Beneath