A GLASS ARTIST’S GIFT: MOSAICS OF ASHCROFT
Papais’ work helps to give ‘prevalent communities’ a voice, through art
“It gets so hot, Old Doc Sanson used to say, there was just a piece of brown paper between Ashcroft and hell.” — display inside the Ashcroft Museum
Marina Papais doesn’t care how high the thermometer climbs, she loves it.
Baking hot and dry, just as her favourite artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, experienced in the New Mexico desert. It’s what drew Papais to this lovely and historic village in the Thompson River Valley, hidden from main highways and, in places, time.
“I didn’t want to go to a desert in the States, so this ... there is a 100-mile corridor that is actually a desert,” said Papais, originally from Vancouver.
Before retirement her specialty as a stained-glass artist was architectural glass in churches, civic buildings and so on.
Her current mission, along with her husband Daniel Collett, a retired architect from Oliver via Kamloops who helps out on her projects, is to cover Ashcroft in high-quality pieces of glass art.
“Tourism has gone up 50 per cent (since her glass mosaics began appearing around town five years ago),” she said. “There are 40 major installations with 164 pieces, and we recently had tourist from France and from Germany come just to see the mosaics.”
The village is full of stories. Tami Pinch, who owns the River Inn Restaurant, has a wonderful one of being raised as a foster child and how that sparked a drive to own her own business someday.
While Pinch and I are chatting at a windowside table with the Thompson River raging past just metres away, John Kidder comes in with one of his daughters and his son-in-law.
Kidder, 71, a hops farmer and jack of all trades who founded the B.C. Green Party in 1983, married Green Party of Canada Leader Elizabeth May on Earth Day in April.
A lifelong federal Liberal until Justin Trudeau came out in favour of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, he is running for the Greens in the coming federal election.
Kidder’s family has been around Ashcroft since the 1930s, and he’s a fascinating story on his own, but he persuaded me to focus elsewhere and tour the town’s mosaics. It was he who gave me Papais’ number, urging me to call her in the morning. I would, but first I spent 30 minutes in the Ashcroft Museum, across the street from the old Ashcroft Opera House. There’s even a polo stick. “Yes, they played polo,” curator Kathy Paulos said. “Walhachin (then known as Canada’s Camelot, now a ghost town) would win at polo and tennis.”
When I did phone Papais, the timing was just right.
The first mural of hers I came across is called Sister City Synergy, in honour of Ashcroft’s Japanese twin city Bifuka. It’s a mosaic blending two paintings, by Royden Josephson who grew up in Manitoba and now lives in Ashcroft, and Kazuhiko Nagaki, a Japanese artist who painted the Japanese mural at Heritage Park on Ashcroft’s Railway Avenue. The idea to merge the two artists’ visions came to her in a dream, Papais said, and she invited me to her studio at the Hub, an elementary school that also houses a gym, photo studio and dance classes. Both Josephson and Nagaki happened to be there.
Nagaki, as well as Japanese consulate general Takashi Hatori, was in town for a ceremony a day earlier for the unveiling of three projects to honour interned Japanese Canadians: One, titled Kan Jo on the side of the IDA pharmacy, translates as “forgiveness without resentment”; another is at the Harmony Bell Tower at the lovely little Heritage Park, where four mosaics are dedicated to the four peoples of Ashcroft’s history: Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese and European settlers.
(The Chinese, there to build the railway and later farm the area’s famous potatoes and tomatoes, at one time outnumbered the Europeans; the Nlaka’pamux, of course, were there long before the others.)
“We want to work all the community voices, to have all their voices be heard,” Papais said. “We have four prevalent communities in this town, and they all need a voice. Through the art, we have been giving them a voice.”