Category: Uncategorized

Skate Path Lanterns

Skate Path Lanterns is a fun project I’ve been working on since 2016, when Edmonton Parks approached me to develop some work for their new Freezeway/IceWay alternative skating paths. They had some room to run ice trails through trees and around a park, so they wanted some artistic lighting in the darker areas. The first couple years I used my regular hanging lanterns, and then some alternate styles. For the 3rd year I believe I developed a new post mount lantern that has become my go-to for this application.

There are now Skate Path Lantern sets in Edmonton, Lacombe, Strathcona County, and St. Albert, all in Alberta, Canada. Each one has a different custom design pattern, often a snowflake related to their community design.

It’s been great to see this grow. I would love to see this project encourage other forest skating paths around the places that have snow. I can support this as an artist or work with other artists as a consultant and platform supplier.

Flying Canoe Volant 2023

2022-2023 was an exciting winter for me, a lot of events happening almost on top of each other. This edition of Flying Canoe Volant brought me to some new collaborations, and the realization of some long held dreams.

The Airship was a big project, a collab with GABS, another local Edmonton light based artist allowed me to work on a dreamed of upgrade to my Canoe Chandeliers. Last year after the event my brother Robin and I were looking at all the things we’d set up. That may have been his first time looking at everything set up in a while, so he was pretty excited about some of the work. We came up with the idea of an Airship Canoe, with flapping paddles for propulsion and flame (effect bulbs) for lift. Later that year I talked to GABS about collaborating on a crew, and she developed an amazing soft sculpture cast of birds and rodents. Apparently they were not on good terms with each other, so the title of the installation is “Squabbles” and features captured birds on a Squirrel lead ship. The birds may have been accused of stealing the squirrels nuts, but I imagine they would have an alternate explaination.

I also put together a new set of fabric lanterns, now called the Fab4 (cause there are 4 of them) and got to involve Marissa Mars in painting them. She came in for a day and sprayed the set with my stencils- I love seeing other artists us my stencil set because it always turns out so different than what I do with them.

I also got to make some cut up canoe installations. This is part of a bigger project that I hope to see develop, but that’s top secret. Anyway, first step has happened and they were super fun.

MoonDrops

MoonDrops is a new lantern style that I was inspired to create sitting in the hottub at Jasper Park Lodge. I’d been invited out to look at setting an installation up for them. That project got bounced from covid related changes, but the artwork more importantly got made. It was an adventure in curved surface modeling, not exactly what the tools I was using were best at, but some extra time and I managed to get a buildable system out of my dreams.

MoonDrops are made from aluminum, one of the more easily recyclable mediums, and post mount on a 2.5″ square tube. I have a set for event installation, and a couple available for sale. These lanterns were built at the end of 2021, and have now shown at a dozen events across Alberta and BC. You can check my store for the retail listing, but contact me directly for a larger scale permanent installation.

Flying Canoe Volant 2017

2017 featured a lot of community art participation, I lead a workshop at Bonnie Doon Community League to make a series of “Church Steeple” lanterns (for the church steeples that the voyageurs were supposed to avoid running into on their canoe flight) out of cardboard and coloured tissue paper. These lanterns were featured on the street way into the ravine, in yards of community members.