Liquid Mountains

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Sean Alward, “Column,” 2016

clay and acrylic resin on canvas, 40” x 30” (courtesy of the artist)

Whenever I come across Sean Alward’s work, I expect to smell the earth and be thrown back in time. Perhaps it’s because I grew up on the North Shore of Vancouver at the foot of a mountain, near trees, canyons and rivers. Those memories are embedded in me. 

Alward, although hailing from Nova Scotia, also has a strong connection to the land and its histories. His latest series, Liquid Mountains, was created with pigment that he mixes with clay from various sites along the banks of the Fraser River. 

In essence, he’s painting with the remains of mountains thrust up from the deep recesses of the planet and then, over millennia, pulverized and carried away by water, part of the endless erosion and reshaping of the planet. 

This process created the floodplain beneath the Lower Mainland, the edge of which includes Coquitlam, where Alward’s work is part of a group show that opens July 13 at the Art Gallery at Evergreen. The Evergreen itself is located near Lafarge Lake, a reclaimed sand and gravel quarry. 

“It’s all under Vancouver, exposed at construction sites and points along the river,” says Alward. “It’s all originally formed underground in magma chambers and pushed up to form the local mountains. So all of these works are dealing with geology in some way.” 

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Sean Alward, “Clinker,” 2016

cyanotype, clay and acrylic resin on canvas, 22” x 18” (courtesy of the artist)

The show, which includes works in various media by Diyan Achjadi, TsēmāIgharas, Kevin Michael Murphy and Holly Schmidt, is titled Mantle, a reference to the inner layer of rock under the earth’s surface.

Alward’s work, Column, debuts in the show. It’s made with clay sourced near Vancouver's Wreck Beach, known for its nude bathers. The work’s verticality makes me think of a stack of rays swimming or flying upward, their rough-hewn wings bearing overlapping topographies that can be read only from above. Wonderful stuff! I like that the piece evokes imaginary life forms extracted from the earth. It’s as though Alward has plastered two-dimensional fossils to the gallery wall.

Alward’s mixed media works offer more layers of meaning. He starts by photographing the sites where he found the clay. He then makes cyanotypes, using an early photographic process that yields blue-tinted images. 

He extends the edges of the cyanotypes with the clay paint, conjuring new, occasionally whimsical, forms that are richly textured and very much of the earth. The works spread like deltas. They make me think of x-rays, another reference to photographic processes, that evoke flora or fish.

“A lot of these forms came from pure play,” says Alward. “It’s kind of a wonky museum artifact approach, where they’ll do a reconstruction based on a fragment of something. 

“So here the cyanotype is the artifact fragment. And then I imagined some kind of bizarre extensions stemming from it. After all, photographs are a fragment of space and time, and they’re often physical things too.” 

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Sean Alward, “Mud Face,” 2016

cyanotype, clay and acrylic resin on canvas, 22” x 18” (courtesy of the artist)

Many of the places where Alward collected clay are historically significant. They include the former Glenrose Cannery on the North Delta bluffs, one of the oldest fish processing plants on the river. It’s also the site of an ancient Indigenous village, so old it can not be assigned to a particular people. Another site is Derby, an early European settlement along the Fraser in Langley. It predates Fort Langley, which was established in the 1820s. 

“There's some great clay there,” says Alward. “And just across the river in Maple Ridge, there was a big brick factory which produced most of the bricks for the first buildings here.” 

The invention of cyanotype (and photography in general) coincides with the early days of settler culture on the West Coast. Alward’s use of clay hints at time scales well beyond our own, reminding us that we exist amongst the trace elements of various histories, whether geological or human. 

It’s almost as if we live at the soft tip of a brush that stretches back to the beginnings of the planet. Alward’s work reminds us of the marvel of life on an endlessly morphing rock that hurtles through space and time. ■

Mantle is on view at the Art Gallery at Evergreen in Coquitlam, B.C., from July 13 to Sept. 1, 2019.