Forestrial Brain Explores Nature's Mysteries

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Jim Holyoak and Matt Shane are doing things backwards. They will hold their “opening” reception Aug. 25 at the end of their show at Open Space, the Victoria artist-run centre. Then two days later, they will take down their massive drawing installation, Forestrial Brain, and roll it into a storage tube.

This is no small feat. The duo, friends since art school, have covered the gallery’s 14-foot-high walls with white paper, carefully cutting around doors and passageways. They are spending their six-week exhibition slot drawing through some 135 linear feet, an undertaking almost as physically demanding as the eight-day hike that inspired it, an arduous 47-mile slog on the notoriously difficult West Coast Trail through Pacific Rim National Park, along the southwest edge of Vancouver Island.

They hiked the trail before starting work at Open Space, making notes and drawings, soaking up the energy of forest and ocean, and gathering stories from fellow travellers. They display pages from their sketchbooks in the stairwell up to the gallery, a place where the show’s title is enticingly drawn as if covered with hairy tree lichens, signalling the tone of the show, a kind of hobbit-informed natural history, or as Shane puts it: the blurry in-between of science and fantasy. “We’re looking at the forest as a mysterious place,” he says. “We’re looking at the mythologies that surround the forest and the whole spectrum of belief systems about forests.”

Clearly, then, Forestrial Brain is no mere travelogue or documentary, though it does refer to their backpacking trip. Rich in varied marks, from misty ink washes that evoke the dank undergrowth of the coastal rainforest to a finely drafted dead sea lion they discovered on a beach, the installation also explores the idea of the forest as an enmeshed and interconnected organism, one where human presence is evoked minimally through a chain of ladders and walkways that snail, soddenly, over steep terrain, amid lush ferns and strange fungi.

One major influence on their thinking is The Hidden Life of Trees: The Astonishing Science of What Trees Feel, How They Communicate, a 2016 book by German forester Peter Wohlleben. “It’s about this new research that’s coming out about how trees can actually communicate and send each other nutrients and send signals to each other about incoming invaders and stuff like that to warn each other,” says Shane. “Trees are much more complicated and they work as a team in ways that we didn’t conceive. We’re just learning about this stuff now. Often times, their roots are connected by mycelia. There’s a network of fungus underground that will transfer the nutrients, so you might see one mother tree that’s a lot bigger than the others that’s actually helping out other trees that are way off in the distance.”

Holyoak observes that humans don’t understand the consciousness of other beings, whether animals or trees, and emphasizes the value of other ways of thinking, dreaming and imagining, both verbally and non-verbally. “Drawing is a non-verbal way of thinking. So is music. So is math. But, often, thought is only conceived of as words. And animals that cannot speak like us are presumed to therefore not have thoughts, not to have intelligence.” As artists, they are free to let their imaginations roam between disciplines. “We’re looking at all of this stuff this from outside and making our own connections,” says Shane. “And I think that’s something artists are able to do that is very interesting. We’re able to connect different disciplines together, as sort of a connective tissue.”

Even with the work still in progress, it’s clearly a fortuitous union of form and subject. The play with scale, such a common artistic device that it often feels tired, seems apt here. The plus-sized scale of the West Coast forest – from giant cedar to not-so-tiny slug – deserves an immersive environment.

Holyoak and Shane have done 19 previous large-scale collaborative drawings, in addition to their own solo work, starting 14 years ago as students at the University of Victoria, when, as roommates, they covered the walls of their rental suite in paper, and began drawing on it together, along with friends, watching it morph and evolve, wrinkling from humidity in the bathroom and getting stained with spaghetti sauce in the kitchen. They have since done other collaborative projects, in Montreal, where they completed graduate studies at Concordia University, and internationally.

Driven by the notion of “going to sleep in the drawing and waking up in the drawing,” their student experimentation opened several threads they have continued to explore – the give-and-take challenges of collaboration, art-making as performance, and durational process-based art. While this roots them firmly in contemporary terrain, they also remain committed to visually appealing work that invites a lingering gaze. “We want to make the best drawing we possibly can,” says Shane.

Open Space

510 Fort Street, 2nd floor, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 1E6

250-383-8833

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