Art salvaging project gathers momentum
By Jon Tattrie
Special to the Chronicle Herald
Efforts to save a sculpture commemorating the Halifax Explosion have gained the interest of Mayor Peter Kelly, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and local artists and historians, but the pieces continue to languish in storage facilities.
As first reported by the Chronicle Herald in April, the late Spanish artist Jordi Bonet was commissioned to create the Halifax Explosion Memorial Sculpture for the 1966 opening of the Halifax North Memorial Library. The piece stood outside the building for almost 40 years before the library took it down.
The badly weathered work was broken up and stored unmarked in facilities across HRM. A group headed by Explosion historian Janet Kitz has been pressing the city to gather the pieces together as the first step to resolving the issue.
John Little, a blacksmith and sculpture who lives in East Dover, is a member of the group. He said the November meeting with Kelly went well. “We all came away feeling good,” he said. “The feeling is he was fully engaged.”
In a letter to the group after the meeting, Kelly said staff would look into the matter to develop a “respectful strategy for the collection and storage of its remaining elements” and to consider possible next steps to exhibiting the piece or parts of the piece.
The group’s main concern is that Kelly didn’t offer a timeline. “We need to do this as soon as possible, before things disappear,” Little said. He adds this is already happening – a bronze doll that was the human face of the memorial has not been seen since 2006. Little fears the doll may have intentionally or accidentally been sold as scrap metal.
Little, a 2007 and 2008 finalist for Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for Tectonic Shift, thinks the state of the pieces and lack of design plans for the original work would make rebuilding Bonet’s sculpture nearly impossible, but he has big ideas for what it could become.
“It would be really neat if this was mounted in a shrine-like setting which is unbelievably substantial – a massive steel girder case with all of the pieces nestled in. It implies ‘Now, this is going to be here forever. We’re making it right,’” he said.
Jamie MacLellan, the man in charge of HRM’s public art policy, admits the treatment of the Bonet sculpture is subpar. In April, he said the pieces would soon be gathered and housed together while their future was planned. The pieces remain scattered in storage facilities and MacLellan now says they could be collected in 2011. “That could be a staging area for the reconstitution process,” he said.
Kitz’s group has suggested Halifax’s planned new Central Library, which has a budget and space for public art, could be a home for the work. “It’s a possibility. It’s something I’m totally willing to discuss with the library board,” MacLellan said.
The library money is for new work and it’s not clear if a reconstituted piece would fit in that budget, or if HRM would have to find the money elsewhere. Contacted by the Herald, the Halifax Public Libraries issued a statement saying it is looking for new art for the Central Library, but would not comment specifically on the Bonet piece.
John Mabley, vice-president of university relations at NSCAD, has been attending the Kitz group’s meetings. While NSCAD is just an observer at this point, it is possible the art college and its students could become involved in salvaging the Bonet piece.
“It affects the life and legacy of an artist and that’s something that is clearly important,” Mabley said.
jon@jontattrie.ca
CAPTION: John Little works in his blacksmith shop in East Dover. (By Jon Tattrie)
- This article first appeared in the Chronicle Herald Januar 9, 2011.