There is a story in the rock
Written by Thea Lim
It takes me a moment to understand what I am looking at. The art piece consists of four identical wooden platforms, each not much larger than a textbook, anchored to the gallery wall. Each holds aloft a lump; a colourless square-ish lump, thick, hefty and so solidly itself, it’s difficult to find words—as in symbolic representation, an abstract stand-in for the thing—to describe it. The less fanciful the better for something so concrete, so lump it is. The surface of each lump is ridged, tactile; they beckon us to touch.
There are pictures of the artist making the art piece: Bonnie Devine at the side of a river edged in rock. She places one foot on the rockshelf, laying a cast on its face like a sheet on a bed. She is photographed from far away, sun-dappled, so it feels like we are there, observing her from a respectful distance. She describes the piece as “four objects cast from a section of rock on the shoreline of the Serpent River in Northern Ontario where I grew up.”[i] Devine titles the piece Letters from Home. Anyone who has visited that landscape can understand what Devine means, how when we cross those lands mottled with rock and river and pine, more cowing than the tallest building in the biggest city, we feel the face of the earth speaking to us.
I spend the winter of 2024 at UTSC, and I find myself thinking of homelands. I visit the exhibition, A rose give its fragrance even to the hand that crushes it, at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, which features a slightly dead plant in the spare, windowless gallery. I recognize it immediately. It’s a bougainvillea, in a pot set within square benches tiled in ochre, hand-painted with red or yellow fruit. When I was growing up in Singapore, bougainvilleas draped the sides of all the highways and overpasses, showering the concrete with colour. Well, they still do. They have long thin branches with green leaves, studded with pink triangular flowers, always in motion from the gusts of cars passing, swaying like something of the sea. Actually, this plant is not a bougainvillea. It’s only the wilting that makes me think it is—it resembles a bougainvillea plant my father gave my sibling, one they tried to keep alive in the corner of a Toronto bedroom, but it only sprouted two flowers instead of forty. Specifically, the plant in the gallery is a Damask Rose. The plants and their benches were created by Waard Ward, an art collective of cultural workers and the Nanaa family, in collaboration with artists Reza Nik and Alize Zorlutuna, to “honour both the memory of the Nanaa’s garden and courtyard, and home lost when they fled amidst the Syrian civil war.”[ii] The plant can’t survive in the gallery. Its paleness in comparison to the live thing, the sensation we feel when we see the plant dying, this is the point. Like how Devine explains there is something in the rock beyond expression: “There is a story in the rock, not related to language or words but mute, elegiac, and undefended.”[iii] This winter is also when the total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza and Palestine by Israel reaches 35,000, since last October. UTSC students make a work of community art in the student centre, a Palestine flag out of hundreds of red, white, and black post-it notes. It covers a window, reaching from floor to ceiling, wide enough it takes ten steps to cross. Each post-it has a hand-written message: Eelam with Palestine, Afghanistan Stands with Palestine—sending love from their homelands to Palestine.
As an artist who works with words, I am often arrested by how the job of the visual is to circumvent words, to reach some part of the brain logic restricts. Logic is an encumbrance when it limits vision to what can only be worded, tallied, or found on a map. This handcuffing of imagination serves the most taxonomically dependent and life-denying forces of our time: imperialism, white supremacy, genocide. Devine says her artistic practice is motivated by “attempts to trace the absence of the Anishnaabek in these territories using the colonial mapping and claiming techniques that have strategically served to erase their history, and the Indigenous methods of mark-making and mapping that reassert it.”[iv] How art might rout the death drive reminds me this Joy James quote: “we do things they never would dare to do because they don’t have an emotional register that includes love.”[v] Devine’s glass casts of the rock face, the dying rose, the post-it flag, all hold love for the land: something is gone from you, yet you can still feel it in your hand.
There is a story in the rock, not related to language or words but mute. When you pay attention to the artwork, attend to the moment it takes before you understand what you are looking at. Does it feel like a static shock in some sleeping part of your brain, or do you feel it like I do, in the roof of your mouth, a place above words? It’s the place love starts from, when we are born, before we have words, before this world took its deathly path. In it, may we find some ingredient to this world order’s unpicking?
[i] Bonnie Devine, “The Great Lakes,” Identity: Art Inspired by the Great Lakes, Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, 14 June 2014. https://arts.lgontario.ca/greatlakes/2014/06/14/bonnie-devine/
[ii] Sandy Saad-Smith, “I have come to you…from the history of the Damascene Rose,” Doris McCarthy Gallery, The University of Toronto. https://dorismccarthygallery.utoronto.ca/publications/essays/i-have-come-to-you
[iii] Bonnie Devine, “Bonnie Devine Artist’s Statement,” Canada & China Contemporary Art Communications. https://www.cacnart.com/bonnie-devine
[iv] Devine, “Bonnie Devine Artist’s Statement.”
[v] Joy James, quoted in Cheryl Rivera. “Not Your Guru.” Lux Magazine: Issue 8. https://lux-magazine.com/article/joy-james/
