Gilbert Hay
In the early twentieth century in Canada, the Group of Seven took a radical approach to landscape painting that moved away from established European traditions of representation. They wanted to develop a uniquely national art that wed an idea of land and geography to the national identity of a country that was barely 50 years old. On May 7, 1920, their first exhibition opened at the Art Gallery of Toronto in Ontario.
By now, their story is familiar to many. Their images typically depicted lands of a distant imaginary: places with no people (a terra nullius), environments with no economies, trees with no traditions. Turtle Island was their tabula rasa. Upon it, they sketched Western ideals of resilience, strength, physical and spiritual purity, and future promise for expansion, ownership and extraction. These ideals were quickly sutured onto personal nationalisms and adopted by a young country wrestling to find its own identity, and have continued to shape the way Canada imagines itself.
One hundred years later, I developed an exhibition for The Rooms in St John’s, NL, considering work produced by the Group on the East Coast of Canada and Eastern Arctic regions. Instead of championing their nationalist stories, Of Myths and Mountains looked to complicate predominant readings of the Group’s work by centring vital voices and ancestries from Nunatsiavut and Nunavik. By orienting the exhibition around artists like Gilbert Hay, asinnajaq, Jessica Winters and Mark Igloliorte, the project sought to destabilize the Group’s colonial gaze and conceptually reinscribe the lands emptied by their brushes. Toward this end, Hay’s work was the very first object visitors encountered when entering the gallery.
My initial reaction to Hay’s work was as a buttress to the fallacy of the Group’s terra nullius. His 1994 sculpture, Elangugaluak (Just a Part of It), is an amorphous, undulating form. As one moves around the sculpture, a number of human faces peer out from within. The faces are bordered by a scalloped pattern that oscillates between impressions of teeth marks, feathers and scales. The work articulates the inseparability of a people from their place.
Born in North West River, NL, in 1951 and growing up in Nain, Nunatsiavut, NL, Hay is a master carver and one of the pillars of the greater Labrador arts community. When I last spoke with him, Hay explained, “Making things with [my] hands was always with me. I had no formal training in terms of making art, but at the same time, I’ve always been into it.”¹ Hay’s art is a translation of lived experience, survivance on the land and working hard to help raise a family. Reflecting on a prolific period starting in the late 1960s, Hay voices an uncommon complaint: “Although I can create a number of pieces in a week or so, I could not keep up with the number of people that were coming and inquiring about the potential of purchasing the work.”
There is a gravitational, mercurial energy to Hay’s work. His passion for and deep knowledge of stone is clear when speaking with him, and these intimate relations emanate out of his works with an unexpected pull. In our conversation, Hay spoke of meteorites landing in Labrador and the effects of the intense heat and pressure on the terrain. There is a spectral potential, astrological reach and geomorphic energy permeating his stories and these, in turn, embody the captivating qualities that he coaxes out of his materials. In some areas the raw nature of the stone is readily appreciable. In others the figurative aspects of the work have a polish that amplifies the materials’ depth and tonality. “I wasn’t interested in getting my pieces to look like a piece of glass. I was interested in getting it to just the edge of, will there be colour,” Hay said. “It is so subtle that if you don’t look at this stuff carefully, you’re going to miss it.”
You cannot remove a people from the land when the land and the people are a part of each other. Emphasizing closeness, Hay told me, “as you pick up the stone, the action happens, and when the action happens, you can imagine the most perfect form of art you have ever seen… But it’s not that easy.” Hay’s work encourages closeness as the creases of lived experience inform each cut, chip and polish. As I deepened my relationship with the work, it propelled me to consider my own relations to (and responsibilities for) the land; it helped clarify my vision of the first paths and traces that were obscured and ignored by the Group’s nationalist gaze.