Gliding through Europe, reflecting on the world

SKY AND WATER JOINED: Dutch museum displays Canadian artist’s glass-covered canoe until March

PETERBOROUGH, Ont. — In September, Canadian artist Brad Copping paddled his special glass-covered canoe for five days along scenic waterways in northern Europe.

A documentary of his 150-kilometre journey shows him gliding down narrow grassy-banked channels, under low bridges and past sandy beaches that, to Copping, seemed almost tropical.

The route took him from one glass museum, GlazenHuis in Lommel, Belgium, to another, the National Glass Museum in Leerdam, the Netherlands. The documentary, with background music by Moby, is being shown at the Leerdam museum, along with Copping’s “mirrored canoe.”

Copping, artist-in-residence at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ont., said the idea for the craft grew out of his experience of paddling a canoe at night under the stars, when he feels like he is “not simply a creature living in this world but a part of its very nature.”

He covered the exterior of a cedarstrip canoe with a mosaic of glass pieces depicting a map of rivers and lakes near his home in the Kawarthas region of central Ontario.

Inside the canoe, he inserted mirrored glass between the ribs. “The effect, when paddling, is of floating in the skeleton of the small vessel, sky and water joined,” he wrote in the canoe museum’s blog.

Text from his European trip journal has been etched into the mirrored interior.

Copping’s exhibit at the Dutch museum runs until March 6.