Earlier this month Belleville sculptor Peter Paylor undertook a 1-week artist residency at Small Pond. He showed up with his
tools and started looking around the farm for inspiration.
He quickly found it in a stack
of old cedar rails. Soon the cedar shavings were
piling up on the barn floor, perfuming the air with that fresh-hamster-cage
smell.
He was working on something…
something big!
During Peter’s stay I was hosting
a Creative Rural Minds event at nearby Loch Sloy; Peter came along and did a
carving demonstration.
Here's Peter with part of his finished
sculpture, Community. It is built from eight pieces of cedar rail fence found on the property; it forms a single piece representing a community of ravens. Behind him you can see another carved fence rail he left as
a gift to Small Pond.
But Peter had one more gift to give us. It was a story. I
recorded his telling of the story one night over dinner:
“It was the first Stickfest, in
2010 (an annual festival at Small Pond). I sat at the firepit and I was carving a piece of Hesperus (one of our trees that had fallen down), and Lisa sat
down and started twisting some wire and making some jewelry. Another woman came
and sat down and started knitting, and eventually the circle was filled with
people, but we didn’t know anybody. I was introduced to this young kid, who was maybe about 13 at the time,
and I was told that he did some carving, and he was curious about me carving
this stick. I asked him if he’d ever carved sumac before. He
hadn’t, and I had a sumac talking stick in the car so I got it and we
talked about carving sumac."
"The woman sitting beside me asked about the stick
and I said that it was a talking stick and told her that they’re used in groups
and sometimes used in storytelling circles, and I said since you’re holding it,
why don’t you tell us a story? Without hesitation she did. She told this cool
story, and it was about a tree. And then she passed it to the person sitting
beside her, it was a young guy, and he told a story about falling out of a tree;
there were a couple of tree stories. There was a very young kid, and I thought
that there’s no way that the stick is going to get to him and beyond him, but
sure enough he had this great story. All the time this was going on there was a
woman sitting there, and again, we didn’t know anybody. She was sitting there
signing (American Sign Language). We weren’t sure if she was signing to
someone. It turns out it was Mary Tiessen who we’ve
since become friends with and she was actually signing for her
husband, Jeff, who was sitting beside her."
"When Mary passed the stick to Jeff she
signed to explain the whole process of what had been going on and he grabbed
the stick and held it against his chest and thought for minute and put the
stick down on his lap, and out of his hands and amazing expressive face and
out of Mary’s mouth came this beautiful story about how he had gone diving with
his father when he was a kid and they had this shore lunch and they had stopped
in this cove and it was the most beautiful place they’d ever seen and wouldn’t
it be great if we could build a cabin here one day and they thought about it
and they went to the province of Newfoundland and they negotiated for years and
actually bought this crown land and they actually built the cabin. It was a
beautiful story, people were in tears, I was in tears. Then when he was done he
got so excited he started giving thumbs up and jumping up and down, and he rushed
over and hugged me. And all day at Stickfest he kept giving me thumbs up and
hugging me. I asked Mary later, it seems a bit much…? and she said: he never
gets to tell a story."
"That was my favourite moment of
when I got to use one of my own talking sticks. I actually told this story to
one of the organizers of the Ottawa Storytellers’ Group, and last I heard they
were planning on arranging a storytelling circle for the Deaf.”
Incredibly, this was the first
time we’d heard this story, which happened almost five years ago. It makes me think of the
impact you can have on someone’s life when you give them an opportunity to express
themselves. And at the heart of it, that is what Small Pond is all about.
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| After hearing Peter's story, I dug through my photos. This photo is from Stickfest 2010, and this is some of the circle of people described in his story. |
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