Building Bridges

Saturday afternoon. 

A typical Canadian January in Peterborough Ontario.

Half a dozen kids are sprawled on the floor of the art studio, delicately handling a variety of somewhat unusual building materials - toothpicks, raisins, straws, connectors, newspaper wands, masking tape...

We are building bridges.

Well, not totally true. 

We're getting to that, but right now, because the unusual materials require some experimentation, the results are more like squares and triangles, cubes and tetrahedra and geodesic beginnings.

But we will GET to bridges...

In front of the large studio window, (with the wintry scene beyond the glass framing her), sits my new friend.

She is the mother of one of the kids. She sits patiently, smiling at the goings-on, occasionally speaking softly to her child in Arabic.

We had met before at a previous art group, got to chatting about her new life in Peterborough - home, family, getting around town, buses, schools.

The weather.

When she shows up to this session, we smile at each other in mutual recognition.

Her child, chatty and cheerful. 

But there is an edgy nervousness that may explain some of their difficult past - the many moves, the destruction of their beautiful homeland, a child's over-eagerness for acceptance.

She sits quietly, smiling warmly whenever our eyes meet. 

When she glances at the clock and stands, I make my way over to her. 

It is mid-afternoon, and she asks if she may use the empty room next door, for just a moment.

To pray.

She is a gentle woman. 

I am struck by the grace she carries with her.

In spite of horrors in her near-past, she is trusting, kind, loving. 

She tells me that Peterborough is such a peaceful place. 

Peterborough.

With the river running through it, it is a city of bridges.

Linking one side to the other, west to east.

Such a peaceful place.

(God, please let it stay that way.)

'Trinity Lake' Large Works

'Credo Lake Passage'  2016   30" x 60"

'Afloat'     2016      3 panels each 24" x 24"

'Toward Trinity Lake'    2016     72" x 96"

Delahay's Line

I am never likely to claim as a certainty, my uncertain but certainly not-impossible Maori ancestry.

                                           

Young Delahay in Auckland NZ

My great-grandmother Delahay Woods Renouf was born in Auckland, New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century.

There she met my great-grandfather John Renouf, who had sailed to Auckland from England aboard the 'Zealandia', a full-rigged clipper ship built in 1869, a trip which took more than three months.

Delahay and John fell in love, and left Auckland for John's home - St. Helier, Jersey, (Jersey being one of the tiny Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy), half a world, (and more than three months), away.

For the next fifteen years they lived there, having ten children, the sixth being my grandfather, Ralph Renouf.
Seven weeks after their tenth child, Kathleen, was born, Delahay died of rheumatic fever.
She was thirty-five.

It is family lore that Delahay was part Maori.
Well, maybe.
Some say that her mother was Maori, though even if there is some truth in that, Delahay's mother may have been half or one-quarter or one-eighth or one-sixteenth Maori.
Maybe.
Or Maori of such distance, that these New Zealand indigenous roots may be as fine as windblown dust.

Delahay in Jersey, Channel Islands

Maybe.                                                      

It is somewhat tenuous, this Maori heritage of mine.
Is it true?

The Renouf Family - John, Delahay, Fred, Nora, Lucy, Mark, Arthur, Ralph, Dennis, Keith, Doris

(before the birth of Kathleen) 

I don't know.
 But I have, at least, travelled to the place of her birth.
In January of 1960, (at the age of four), I sailed, (along with the rest of my family), aboard the SS Arcadia, a two week-long voyage from Vancouver to Auckland.
Here we lived for sixteen months.
Like my great-grandmother, I began my education, dipped my toes in the seas that washed the pebbled beaches of Ladies Bay and the black sands of Piha, ran barefoot, stared out at Rangitoto, ate guavas, breathed air scented with tropical flowers, observed the same muted landscape.


What I do know is that I feel a deep connection to Delahay.

As a visual artist I see her, to a certain extent, as my muse. 
The concepts of roots, and journey, and sense of place, are what my art is about.



And I feel a certain sense of duty to her. 
My great-grandmother lived only to be thirty-five. 
At that age, I was just (slowly) getting it together, as far as my art is concerned. 
And my art is, at least in part, my legacy. 
As one of her offspring, shouldn't I be compelled, in one way or another, to tell her story too?
Isn't her story a part of me?



So I reserve the right to explore my 'maybe'. 
It may be fiction, and it may be a fine threadlike wisp of a root, but I refuse to discount the possibility that my ancestor, Paikea, may have travelled to New Zealand on the back of a whale, just as I travel my Ontario canoe routes, (via a 1962 Chestnut canoe), through abstract landscapes and tree images.



I reserve the right.
And I do it for Delahay.