Screaming Heads turn grounds into gallery
Artist’s towering works of art attract visitors from around the globe to Burk’s Falls
BURK’S FALLS, ONT.— Ontario’s near north embraces an enchanted spread of “surreal estate” that visitors have been discovering for more than two decades.
From all over the globe they come to wander among a collection of towering sculptures of screaming heads spread across artist Peter Camani’s grounds.
It’s the retired high school art teacher’s fulfilment of a lifelong vision of creating a castle home in a natural setting where he can pursue his craft.
Highlighted in articles, videos, documentaries and images of the world’s most unusual places, Screaming Heads — Midlothian Castle & Gallery must be seen to be believed.
Visitors keep coming back in droves, such as the 1,500 electronic music fans who make an annual trek up to the site outside of Burk’s Falls, Ont., in the Almaguin Highlands, for the Harvest Festival.
The event is a weekend-long September camp-out bash where pulsating rhythms, lasers and strobe lights transform the structures and landscape into a dreamland of dancing trees and swaying monoliths.
They have been coming to the festival for10 years, and it’s such an established event that festival organizers erected four permanent steel-frame structures.
When covered with fabric, these structures form large music and entertainment venues. The largest one resembles a spaceship that crash landed in Camani’s meadow.
The main attractions, the Screaming Heads of Midlothian Ridge, are six-metre high concrete otherworldly monuments created by Camani on 125 hectares that contain fields, woods and ponds. Those who come wander in awe of the 10- to 20-tonne cement and steel-reinforced artworks, and many have posted videos on YouTube and images online.
Since 1989, Camani has worked transforming farmland into a sprawling artscape around his unique home, a mesmerizing work of art in itself that he began building eight years earlier as he approached the end of his teaching career.
Looming large is the castle’s screaming head turret. It is Camani’s elevated meditation room, a lofty chamber with a wide-open mouth front window and glass portal eyes gazing out across the countryside. A two-headed dragon chimney belches smoke and sparks when a wood fire crackles in the hearth, and sculpted gargoyles, seeing, hearing, speaking and thinking no evil, sit perched along a parapet surrounding the building, transformed from a rundown old farmhouse into a mysterious manor.
It is the gatehouse to the enchanted forest and field, where scores of colossal screaming heads, some with fingers and hands, reach out from the ground.
In the rolling landscape they appear to be grasping out to be pulled from the waves.
“I made the heads and the hands coming out of the fields to look as if they were survivors from a shipwreck waiting to be rescued,” Camani explained.
Depending on the angle they’re viewed from, concrete trees morph into shapes.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse burst from the earth, and concrete dragons’ claws seem to emerge from the netherworld along the entrance to the property outside Camani’s castle wall.
There are 84 large monuments, and numerous smaller ones, clustered in sections.
Many bear a different inscription on its concrete base. It’s an ongoing art project in which concrete is poured into plastic moulds and the finished sculptures are hoisted by crane onto their cement bases.
“Since I have such a large amount of space I have them laid in four separate parts, so you could walk through the property and go through different environments,” Camani said.
Four structures include the ashes of people who died, one who Camani knew, mixed in the cement, and each contains an epitaph honouring the deceased.
“There are a number of people who don’t know what to do with the ashes and for some it is comforting to know they are in a particular spot,” he said. “They’re part of the landscape; they have an identity.”
The positioning of Camani’s cement figures may seem random on the ground but they are arranged according to a plan.
Seen from a rise or aloft in a hot-air balloon or an aircraft, a collection of screaming heads arranged in a circular Stonehenge pattern form the shape of an eye, complete with a brow on one edge and a pupil in the centre.
Together it all forms the shape of a dragon. Its concrete claws are the ones at the entrance to the grounds. Camani said they are meant to resemble “the earth rebelling against what we’re doing to the land.”
Since 1987, Camani has planted about 22,000 trees that have filled in sections of the once-cleared farmland with woods, and some spots now obscure aerial views.
He also created a series of springfed ponds. Beside one of them he’s building a castle facade with a wall, turrets and more screaming heads, all of which will be reflected in the water.
A hardy flock of more than a dozen peacocks have lived on the property for 15 years, as has Gandalf the gander, whose mate passed away a few years ago.
Fed by Camani, the animals wander freely on the property.
While people are free to visit, Camani is protective of his privacy, which is the reason there is a wall around his castle. But he’s no hermit, as he has been known to interact with visitors.
“I have to separate my house from the fields, and especially the area that I’m working in, for people’s safety, as well as my privacy,” he said.
“And I do like to know in advance when large groups of people are going to show up.”
Recently, about 90 high school art students arrived unannounced and caused a bit of mayhem when some strayed into the artist’s personal space while chasing the peacocks.
“In the summer and fall there can be 30 to 40 cars here at once and I do try to maintain a good relationship with people, but it can tend to get overbearing,” Camani said.
“When large groups show up and I’m not notified it can make the whole thing very uncomfortable.”
Most large groups, such as the Harvest Festival attendees and members of a disc golf club, who hold their annual competitions on a course set up around the sculptures, schedule their events well in advance and they are respectful of the land, the artworks and the sculptor who continues to create them.
Black flies can be extremely annoying in the spring and the snow is deep in winter, but some souls brave the elements to experience Camani’s world with bug repellent, skis and snowshoes. hstancu@thestar.ca