The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, where it sits in its beautiful location along the Saint John River, is a natural spot to host an artist in residence. An artist here can draw not only from the wonderful collection and interaction with the staff, but from the very place itself. It is not often, however, that an artist’s body of work, mind, and process are as open and available as that of ceramic artist and sculptor Alanna Baird of St. Andrews, New Brunswick.
Alanna sits quietly in the sunlight beaming in through a gallery window, the cold winter outside at bay while she draws a hot bead of plastic along a mould with a surgeon’s precision. We are sitting in a triangular room, where Alanna, known in the art world by her handle Tinfish, is spending two weeks as the artist in residence at the gallery. Sitting here, we are surrounded by pieces of Alanna’s work going back three decades.
I look over elegant hand-made prints on the wall and the gorgeous, shimmering sculptures of fish in varying metals (from which she takes her name). Hanging from the ceiling are delicate and intricate organic forms that rest somewhere between ocean creatures and floating ships of other worlds. These works only hint at what creative currents flow below the surface.
Alanna had a different life in mind when she began studying engineering at the University of New Brunswick in 1973. But after a few years of hard but successful study, she found herself drawn to the arts and left the program early in her fourth year. From her studies, Alanna took with her a technical skillset that she spent the following decades applying to all manner of materials and artistic expression.
She spent years learning and practicing pottery, the clay and glazes carrying the constant risk of failure that every potter who opens a kiln door knows all too well. Today, you can find her ceramics quietly sitting in private collections and homes around the world.
It was a contest to create a wind vane in 1991 at the Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, that lead to the spark that exploded and changed her direction. She dove in, working with metal for the first time, and her finished vane — although it didn’t win — was purchased privately shortly thereafter.
The next few years would see her create dozens of metal fish, incorporating not just copper, but a menagerie of materials. Not least of these fish was a series made entirely from recycled metals. Her creations have become more complex and detailed over time, and they have also grown larger. In 2011, Alanna landed a coveted commission to create a public installation, which now sits in front of the Huntsman Marine Discovery Aquarium in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Spike, an enormous copper fish, is breathtaking in its scope, detail and beauty.
In 2013, she won the prestigious Kingsbrea Sculpture Competition, an international contest in St Andrews that is considered one of the most important in Canada. Her winning piece, Salmon Vortex, is a vibrant sculpture of three salmon made from recycled roof copper. Salmon Vortex remains on display in the Kingsbrae Sculpture Garden.
Alanna’s fish and other works are featured in collections from Canada and the U.S. to Australia. These are much more than sculptures of fish; they breathe and move with life. Their motion, an impossible illusion, is a testament to Alanna’s talent with form and texture.
When she is working, Alanna has a fierce and determined concentration that a visitor is hesitant to interrupt. When the spell is broken, she is friendly and affable, particularly happy to see tiny visitors stumble in and ask their questions. She lets little hands touch metal and materials, telling them how the plastic is heated or how a bronze mould works. Although much of her work is solitary, Alanna seems in her game when speaking to a room full of admirers or a curious toddler — or, for that matter, a trouble-making journalist.
Alanna has lightning in her eyes when she speaks about the processes that brought about her recent work with Polylactic Acid (PLA), the polymer that has become her most recent mode of expression. The plastic is manufactured using plant-based materials, such as sugarcane, which is why it is referred to as ‘the green plastic.’
She shows me the evolution of Sea Urchin shapes, which themselves came from a piece of pottery she created years ago. She tells me about the journey of drilling holes and creating bumps on the surface to create the sea forms that capture her. Moving from ceramics to bronze, a material she is still exploring, has given the urchins more flexibility and opportunity for change.
Her process created forms with larger and larger holes, creating space and letting light in, making the inside of the vessel as critical and engaging as the outside. This led to a revelatory moment; playing with a small plastic pen, she realized the potential of creating these forms in other materials, allowing light to not only get inside but pass through her pieces. Looking around the gallery studio, I see these beings hanging from the ceiling and wall. Light dances through the airships and fantastic deep-sea creatures, and it creates shadows in strange patterns on walls, extending their dimensions even further. The wall, the room have now become part of the installation.
Alanna’s goal for her time in residence was to incorporate the gallery’s collection into her work somehow. She was particularly taken with the pieces in the Inuit collection. It brought to mind the work she had seen by James Houston after he had gone to Japan to study printmaking. He took the methods he learned in Japan to the arctic, where a beautiful stone carving sparked in him a new idea. He would produce prints of the sculpture, which could be easily transported to and sold in the galleries of the south, providing a way for local artists to make money from their art.
Alanna has started to explore ideas, specifically the Birds of Kenojuak Ashevak. She is incorporating her own textures, holes and dots, bringing to mind the work of Yayoi Kusama — an innovating and well-known Japanese artist, who is still active well into her nineties. The confluence of these artists’ work with Alanna’s own feels like a perfect meeting, not only for the forms and the materials but also for the space of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
It was interesting and moving to be in a room with such an artist and to look over a lifetime of creation, seeing the evolution and imagination that led from one form and process to another.
Alanna Baird’s work can be found in several galleries in Eastern Canada, and you can follow her and all of her explorations online at Tinfish.com.