Article from The Georgia Straight.
Take a walk down Telford Avenue in Burnaby and you might find something unexpected: a series of huge boulders nestled on a side street.
It’s the newest public installation from legendary Vancouver artist and author Douglas Coupland. Titled 21st Century Rock Garden, the chunks of basalt and jade are arranged like a Japanese rock garden, called a karesansui.
“We have all these really incredible rocks and minerals here in Vancouver slash British Columbia,” Coupland says on a call. “And we never really think of them as objects.”
Rocks are clearly a fascination of his. While they are mostly seen as resources to be extracted, Coupland argues that the geological formations themselves are gorgeous—and come with histories that stretch far beyond what humans can conceive of.
“The oldest rocks on earth that are still exposed are on the eastern shore of Hudson’s Bay. They’re about 4.3 billion years old; I don’t think our brains were meant to fully understand geological time,” he says in wonder, referencing the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in northern Quebec. “It sort of blows your mind. And then you look at the jade here, for example: it’s got some milky streaks in it. At one point in history, x billion years ago, it was a molten, glowing, 4,000-degree celsius blob that was frozen in time, and became that rock.”
For his artwork, Coupland sourced boulders from local stone yards, including basalt from Whistler.
“The really good ones are hexagonal,” he enthuses, “and most of them get shipped down to the States. It seems criminal not to be using these beautiful stones in some way that celebrates their beauty.”
Coupland’s work has long sought to bring the natural into the urban. Tree Snag places a huge model of a section of dead tree in between two buildings in Ambleside to demonstrate resilience; Golden Tree, his 43-foot sculpture in South Vancouver, models an old growth tree trunk in gold, while Digital Orca in Coal Harbour asks about the history and future of local wildlife.
21st Century Rock Garden seeks to do a similar thing, even if it’s less obvious at first glance. Situating six ancient rocks in a new development in Burnaby brings pre-history and the present together in a startling juxtaposition. The natural shapes of the rocks contrast with the sharp angles of the buildings, reminding viewers of what was in this area before the modern construction.
Read the full article here.
Learn more about Telford on the Walk here.