Three in running for $10,000 prize
Published Thursday June 25th, 2009
Sculpture Finalists named in Kingsbrae Garden competition
ST. ANDREWS - Art can bring Canadians together, Kingsbrae Horticultural Garden director Andreas Haun believes.
Haun explained the vision following the official launch of the Kingsbrae Garden Sculpture Competition 2009.
A total of 17 Canadian artists entered 18 works in the competition, which Kingsbrae Garden patroness Lucinda Flemer cut the ribbon to officially open to the public.
Beaverbrook Art Gallery director Bernard Riordan named the three finalists in alphabetical order - Brett Davis's Heron, Bozena Happach's Windy Day and Kerry O'Toole's Canadian Geese in Flight - for the $10,000 first prize and $5,000 second prize to be awarded this fall.
Kingsbrae Garden will keep the first- and second-place winners, while a private patron will buy third-place finisher. The other 15 works are for sale.
Visitors to Kingsbrae Garden, including the new sculpture garden, have the opportunity to fill out ballots for the "people's choice" winner also to be named this fall.
By holding the competition every year, Kingsbrae Garden hopes to build a significant collection of emerging Canadian sculpture, Haun said.
"The ultimate vision for this is that the winners of this will be on exhibit here every year," he said.
The first-place winners over the years will likely be exhibited in the sculpture garden with the second-place winners deployed there or elsewhere throughout Kingsbrae Garden. Someday the second-place winners might number enough for a second sculpture garden.
Entries came from Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia and points in between including six from New Brunswick.
In time Haun expects Kingsbrae Garden to amass a must-see collection of Canadian sculpture from across the country.
"It's a great glue for the country. I think this is so significant for the country because we have a chance to bind everyone together."
"It keeps us a little more civilized," he said. "We always worry about our health care, but we miss the art."
The finalists are from New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario.
Finalist Kerry O'Toole, born in Oshawa, Ont., came to New Brunswick in 1976 and lives in Woodstock.
One could describe his entry, Canadian Geese in Flight, as a whirligig. He mounted the geese, carved from laminated plywood, onto a metal frame that rotates on an upright so that it always points into the wind like a weather vane.
When a breeze turns the propellers on the ends of the birds' wings the friction between the pieces of wood sounds remarkably like geese honking overhead.
"I had a lot of fun with it, it was a lot of work," O'Toole said in an interview. He had worked on the project since last fall.
Bozena Happach lives in Montreal. Her entry Windy Day is made of wire mesh, copper, resin and fibre. It represents a woman with a tattered umbrella caught in a gust of wind.
Brett Davis, of Newmarket, Ont., entered Heron, a bronze depiction of the water bird with a fish in his beak.
The artists who did not make the cut for the three finalists all hope people buy their works this summer. They do not want to take them home this fall,
Some, like Po Chun Lau of Toronto and Pouch Cove, N.L., need the money for their next projects.
And what does her bronze entry Silent Witnesses convey?
Women waiting on shore for fishermen to come home, she suggested, or it could be anything you want.
Besides the two figures entered in the Kingsbrae Garden competition, she has three more on exhibit at Kiwi Gardens in Perth, Ont.
She has several more of these creations in wax and burlap, waiting to be cast in bronze at the foundry. She would like to do more. "I want to continue and if I get an opportunity to make them bigger, I would love that."
Kingsbrae Garden occupies 27 acres donated by John and Lucinda Flemer of Montreal and St. Andrews. The provincial government owns the land. The non-profit organization Kingsbrae Horticultural Garden Inc. administers it. The garden opened in 1998.
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