Emily carr biography video of charles
Workshop + Conversation with Charles Campbell
Charles Campbell will hold two events, the afternoon workshop is intended for students and faculty and has limited capacity - sign up instructions are below.
The evening lecture welcomes all members, friends, and neighbours of the Emily Carr community to join the evening conversation and discussion.
Storying for Awakening: Workshop with Charles Campbell
Thursday 27 February 13:00 - 15:00 @ 3rd Floor West Atrium
This workshop is open to students and faculty interested in embodied storytelling as a mode of awakening and a means for activating erased, marginalised, and underserved presence and voices. Through a series of prompts and exercises, Charles Campbell will share his creative process and research methodology for his performance project Actor Boy: Travels in Birdsong, which, by responding to histories of migration and settlement, manifests alternative possible futures.
In keeping with the intimate work of this session, participants are limited to 20 on a first come, first served basis. Please e-mail Candice Hewitt at chewitt@ecuad.ca to secure a spot, to be confirmed by reply.
On Erasure and Emergence of Communities: Charles Campbell in conversation with Denise Ryner, Phanuel Antwi, and Vanessa Richards
Thursday 27 February 17:30 - 19:00 @ Reliance Theatre, with light refreshments
How can we pay attention to absence and what does it take to address erasure? Drawing out the lines of flight in Charles Campbell's artistic investigations of historical, ecological, and culture ruptures in instinctual and involuntary human and animal migration, this multivocal panel discussion folds and travels through time and space to interrogate those forces that lead to the historical erasures of communities and inspect those memories that mobilise their reappearance and revitalisation.
A few words about our guest artist and speakers on 27 February:
Charles Campbell (MFA, Goldsmiths) is a multidisciplinary artis Ifirst encountered the photographs on this screen while researching From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, an exhibition I organized with Ian Dejardin, director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in London. (It opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario on April 11.) Born in 1871, Carr lived until 1945, and during that time the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples was proceeding full throttle. In the decade preceding Carr’s birth, smallpox had devastated British Columbia, with government officials having done little to stem the epidemic. About half the Aboriginal population perished; the death toll reached as high as 90 percent in the north. By the 1870s, the Canadian government had implemented an aggressive program of forced cultural assimilation. Children were taken from their families and communities, and institutionalized in residential schools. Malnutrition, along with physical and emotional abuse, was commonplace. At the same time, an influx of missionaries and anthropologists stripped Native communities of ancestral regalia and feast vessels, rattles and amulets, and, of course, totem poles, which came to reside far away in the museums of North America and Europe, where most remain to this day. In 1884, the ban on the potlatch ceremony struck an additional blow, crippling an important mechanism for the consolidation of community and identity, and for the transmission of knowledge, property, and clan entitlements. Finally, as the twentieth century dawned, the landscape was increasingly ravaged by industrial logging practices. No longer was the natural world honoured as the seat of identity and spiritual connection, as it had been for millennia. Rather, it was aggressively reframed as a commodity, with Indigenous people struggling to find an equitable footing within the new economy. That struggle continues today. Some of the pictures I encountered in my research left a deep mark on me, and I share them here with a sense of inquiry, sadness, In 1962, the province of British Columbia purchased the estate of Victoria’s William Arnold Newcombe. It included more than one hundred works of art — oil and watercolour paintings, pencil and pen drawings, charcoal sketches, and more — by Emily Carr, who is today recognized as one of the most important artists of early twentieth-century Canada. Newcombe’s father, Dr. Charles Frederic Newcombe, was an early benefactor of Carr who purchased several of her works of Indigenous-inspired art. The younger Newcombe, meanwhile, grew to become a trusted friend, neighbour, and supporter of Carr throughout her life. In the Summer 1962 issue of The Beaver, another of Carr’s friends, Flora Hamilton Burns, wrote an article describing the Newcombe collection. Entitled “Emily Carr and the Newcombe Collection,” the article detailed how the elder and younger Newcombe each played key roles in supporting Carr’s artistic career. Burns explained how Charles Newcombe met Carr in 1889 when she was just eighteen years old. About a decade later — after Carr had developed her painting skills as well as an interest in Indigenous culture — Newcombe encouraged the artist to travel to remote locations in British Columbia to paint scenes of Indigenous communities and traditional art. Charles Newcombe also purchased several of Carr’s earliest art pieces, thereby helping to establish her career. The younger Newcombe, whom Carr lovingly called “Willie,” supported the artist in many ways after the death of his father in 1924. For instance, he installed racks for her paintings and even built an aviary for her budgies. Carr famously had a menagerie of exotic pets, including parrots and a Javanese monkey. “Willie was literally her right-hand man,” Burns wrote. In 1942 — three years before her death — Carr named Newcombe as one of three trustees charged with overseeing her newly created Emily Carr Trust Foundation, which controlled much of her art. Burns’ 1962 article also showcased Notable Books