Catching people’s attention
Childhood memories prompt Newfoundland artist's creation of a stained glass ice-fishing shack
A shack might not be the best word to describe Urve Manuel’s latest creation.
That’s because her icefishing shack, made of stained glass, is far from being the type of primitive structure one would normally associate the term with.
Manuel, owner of The
Glass Station Gallery and Studio in Rocky Harbour, N.L., has been living and creating glass art in the Northern Peninsula town for about seven years.
The ice-fishing shack is something she has wanted to make for years, but just never had the time nor the money to do so.
And even though she had no luck securing funding for the project through various arts grants, Manuel couldn’t get the idea out of her mind.
“And I just thought, I’m just going to do it. I’m not going to wait for grants or whatever because it’s something I have wanted to do,” she told SaltWire Network. “It kind of stems from happy childhood memories, I suppose, with my brothers and grandfather out on the ice fishing and the little ice-fishing communities that are really just kind of neat."
Those ice-fishing communities were a common winter occurrence growing up in northern Ontario.
“They’re so seasonal. They just pop up. All of a sudden there’s a little town out on some body of water. Come spring break-up, they’re gone,” said Manuel.
CREATING THE SHACK
She started on the project around mid-October, designing
the shack and drawing everything out before working on each stained-glass panel that would be used in the structure.
“It all flows together,” she said of the completed piece that sits on a metal frame.
“Each wall connects to the next wall even as you go around the 90-degree turns and then the roof panels are completely separate from the body of it.”
The roof is what she calls an "artistic version" of the horizon line of the Tablelands with the Northern Lights above it. The wall panels are all underwater scenes with a polar bear on one of the larger sides and a seal on the other. The front
and back have scenes of fish.
The completed life-size structure is over four feet wide and about eight feet long, including the sled she uses to tow it on, and close to eight feet tall.
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON THE COMMONPLACE
To see it all set up with lights glowing through the panels, Manuel said she felt the same way she normally does about her work.
“Like OK, this is kind of what I imagined. That’s really good. Now what?” she said.
“It’s different and it reflects, I guess, what I like and what I work with, which is the glass, and the biggest attraction
is the colour the way light goes through it.
“My enjoyment is the process, going from designing it, doing my patterns, choosing the glass, kind of thinking how it’s all going to work out. And then when I finally put it together, it’s like ‘Oh, OK, that’s what it looks like’ or ‘I think I want to change that’ or ‘Wow, I really like these things about it.’”
So, while her reaction may
subdued, have been somewhat the "wow" reaction of others came as a bit of surprise after she posted pictures of the shack on Facebook and Instagram. There have been times in the past when posts didn’t generate much reaction.
“But this one has really caught people’s attention and it might be because ice-fishing is part of the culture here as well and it’s kind of a recognizable structure. People can relate to it,” said Manuel.
“Someone described it as just taking a different perspective on something that seemed so commonplace before.”
Just how commonplace can be found in the reaction of one person who stopped by while the structure, which is fully functional as an icefishing shack, was being set up.
Manuel wasn’t around at the time, but friends told her the person was concerned that she was going to be fishing early because ice fishing season doesn’t open until
Feb. 1.
“I don’t know if they were worried that I would catch all the fish before anybody else did or that I didn’t know what the timelines were and they were concerned I might get in some kind of trouble,” she said with a laugh.
Because the glass may not hold up to the unpredictable weather of the area, Manuel only left the shack up for a day and then uninstalled it at night. The next day, after making a few minor changes, she set it up for another day.
By Jan. 27, she figured she had about five days of work ahead of her to finetune the shack to make it easier to install and take apart.
She plans to set it up again in various locations around the local area, including some that can only be accessed by snowmobile.
“Little surprise locations where people don’t go very often, and it might be the odd person shows up and all of a sudden in the middle of nowhere goes ‘look at that," she said.