“All Life Comes from Her”—A Gathering Place for Narratives at the Edges
The fourth Bonavista Biennale in Newfoundland was an exploration of meeting points, of the communal but sometimes parasitic energy that sparks when one place becomes home to another.
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2023See Original
In a workshed behind Durdle’s, a shuttered hardware store on a side street in the old Newfoundland fishing town of Bonavista, sits Billy Gauthier’s The Earth, Our Mother, what might be the unofficial centrepiece of the fourth Bonavista Biennale. It’s carved out of a decades-dead skull—4’8” tall, 6’8” wide—belonging to the second largest creature on earth, the fin whale.
Gauthier created the sculpture during the Biennale’s first seven days. It was meant to be moved to a dramatic coastal location once completed, but it proved too fragile to relocate. Now, the shed is its temporary home. As Gauthier writes in his artist statement—six letter-sized pages placed on an old wooden workbench—what wasn’t there in the skull is what spoke to him first: the void for the spinal column and brain cavity. In the empty parts, he saw a place to start.
He carved her a mouth, to give her a voice. He carved her eyes, so that she could see. He carved her nostrils, so she might smell the salt and spruce of the peninsula. But he didn’t give her ears. “It’s us that needs to listen,” he writes.
Gauthier’s skull teems with small details of life, from the tunniit on her forehead to the sun and the moon at its extremes. There are hints of the Torngats, of owl feathers. When you walk around it, you’ll see a delicately carved seal at the back, lunging from the mother to feed. The local host looking after the space describes watching Gauthier at work, finding the mother within the skull, as she shows us a bag of bone dust.
“All life comes from her,” Gauthier writes in his statement. The skull lifts something dead into something hopeful—a celebration of what we can still build together.
The mental landscape of outport Newfoundland and Labrador—Ktaqmkuk, Nitassinan, Nunatsiavut, and NunatuKavut—is shaped and eroded, more than any other force, by the waves of loss that still crash over it relentlessly. Those of us who come from here—at least those of us whose ancestors came in poverty to work the fish, off the back of empire—often talk reverentially of old times, how they were taken away as if by surges we had no control over. We do this knowing too of all the other future moments that were stolen away, from the Mi’kmaq, the Inuit, and most fundamentally of all, the Beothuk. In the shaping of our idea about this place, we point to the geological record as much as we do the written and oral ones—our ideas of self wrapped up in the ancient fossils, the first things to die here. We have a tendency to treat landscape as the only museum we have, a fossil to preserve, at the edges of memory.
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