Svea FErguson
It took a trip to B.C., specifically a weeklong horseback trip in the Chilcotin, for Svea Ferguson to settle on an idea for the Alberta Biennial. “It’s a pretty, largely untouched piece of indigenous land in northern B.C. where I have some family ties,” she says. “It was sort of this quintessential, stereotypical idea of being Canadian— maybe what a lot of people would stereotypically think Canadians are or experience.” Her series of works, Wilderness drawing,
three ways, arises from an attempt at “drawing, in a more metaphorical sense, what that experience was in many different forms,” she says. The Biennial curators, Kristy Trinier and Peta Rake, asked Ferguson if she wanted to do a piece for Ernest C. Manning Hall, an atrium at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Ferguson created two large sculptures, one a “representation of a mountain in a very broken down sense,” the second a woven rope tied into one of the knots used to load pack horses. “That experience of being totally off the grid, everything you own is on a horse with you— that was such a large and intense experience,” she says. “I thought that would be appropriate to bring into such a large space.”
The security camera in the middle of the mountain, though prominent, wasn’t meant to be part of the piece. “I was aware that it was there, but I don’t think I was aware of how visually present it was,” she says. “I’m still figuring out how I feel about it because it becomes a part of it. When you’re working in a public space like that, there’s a lot of logistics to deal with.”
Ferguson says she hasn’t yet had a sculpture hang for the duration of a long exhibition, and she’s conflicted about how to approach the eventual effect of gravity on her pieces, which she fashions from linoleum and vinyl flooring. “It’s finding a balance between… trying to stop it from sagging, stretching out over time and how much of that is part of the material, and therefore, part of the work?” she says. “I try to embrace that as much as I can.”
It’s fitting that Ferguson’s contributions to the Alberta Biennial were inspired by a trip; in order to experience all her work, the viewer also has to make a journey. The series includes the two sculptures at the AGA, and a cyanotype on display at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. The latter shows the “big rig that I had built to make the (rope) weaving; those were 40-foot little strips of linoleum cut up.”
Ferguson thinks the trip will prove rewarding for viewers. “You can go and stand in the presence of these large sculpture installations and feel what that relationship is—to the viewer, to the work—to be dwarfed by something so big,” she says. “Then have the opportunity to have some time and space and see the print and how that connects to the other work.”