Daphne Bramham
Leaving mark on Vancouver: Coast Salish woman’s works adorn manhole covers, police cars, airport Canada Line station
The Coast Salish have no words for art and artist in their language, even though for millennia they have created beautiful, functional things from house posts to woven blankets to baskets to serving spoons.
So the idea of being an artist never occurred to Susan Point. It was only when other people began buying and collecting her work that Point began to describe what she creates as art and use the word artist to describe who she is.
Even if you don’t know her name, it’s almost certain that if you live in Vancouver or have ever visited, you will have seen her work.
Point is so prolific and has done so many public art projects that her work is almost inescapable. Even her family jokes about it, suggesting that at some point Vancouver should be renamed Pointland.
Among her many pieces of public art are the giant cedar owl at the entry to the Canada Line station at Vancouver International Airport, the welcome figure at the entry to the Museum of Anthropology and three cedar house posts in Stanley Park.
In the past year alone, Point has overseen the installation in North Vancouver of her 240-metre-long cast concrete piece Story of Life — which runs along the retaining wall of the Low Level Road — and of her four-metre-high copper-and-aluminum-tipped Fusion on Granville Street at 70th Avenue in Vancouver.
Her designs sweep up buttresses outside the Richmond Olympic Oval and across five stained glass windows at Christ Church Cathedral, visible not only to parishioners but to anyone walking or driving along busy Georgia Street.
But Point doesn’t only work on a grand scale.
Her thunderbird — the protector in Salish legend — sweeps over the front-wheel arch of Vancouver Police Department squad cars, while her transformation series of tadpoles to frogs decorate city manhole covers.
Point’s own transformation began prosaically. In January 1981, she was a secretary on maternity leave when she signed up for an eight-week jewelry-making course at Vancouver Community College.
By the time the course had ended, Point was doing her own designs, drawing them first on paper and transferring them to metal. She quickly moved on to printmaking.
Soon, Point did an unthinkable thing for a Salish woman. She learned to carve cedar not from other indigenous carvers, but from John Livingstone, who had been trained and adopted by the Hunts, the Kwakwaka’wakw family who are almost synonymous with the revival of West Coast carving.
“In my time, women didn’t carve,” she says. “Initially, I was reluctant to carve because it was a man’s thing. But I picked it up so easily. The smell of the wood calms you. It’s meditative.”
Point works mainly in the late afternoon and into the night. Sometimes a now-grown son and daughter help with her projects or work alongside her on their own projects with their children playing nearby.
“For me, my prints are my fingerprints; they reveal my thoughts and feelings on paper,” she wrote in the recently released book Susan Point: Works on Paper.
As we went around her studio on the Musqueam land in south Vancouver, she talked about a massive carved bowl — a form for a bronze version. Across the studio, carefully propped against the wall were carved medallions — 86 separate but adjoining faces — that will also be cast in bronze and displayed near the soon-to-be-opened Audain Art Museum in Whistler.
Point’s curiosity and creative restlessness have led her to work not only in wood, but also in stone, glass, bronze, copper, aluminum, bone, horn, ceramic, steel, polymer, concrete, cast iron, silver, gold and canvas.
Yet she’s always come back to carving cedar.
Every year, Point puts in up to eight proposals in response to calls for large public art installations. Scattered throughout the studio and her home are hundreds of rough sketches and unfinished projects.
“Carving is getting more difficult as I get older,” Point says. “But I picked up some charcoal recently.”
She did a rough drawing of a Salish woman that she’s happy with. But charcoal is for later when the wood is too hard.
Aside from having spent the last 35 years creating beautiful things, Point was instrumental in rescuing Salish art and traditions from the brink of extinction. It is distinctly different from other kinds of West Coast art.
Traditionally, the Salish used only black, white and grey.
Point’s designs use the traditional shapes — crescents, wedges, V-cuts and ovals — with the negative space, the unpainted areas, forming circles.
While Point is respectful of tradition, she is more interested in how those forms and traditions can be translated into something relevant to the 21st century and to the diverse Canadian population.
It took some time for Point to embrace the title of artist. But long since having earned it, she’d prefer it came with fewer adjectives.
“Because I’m First Nations, I’m categorized as a Coast Salish First Nations artist,” Point says. “I would prefer just being called an artist.”