Rachelle Chinnery

At the edge of the continental shelf of Western Canada sit the Queen Charlotte Islands. Haida Gwaii, as the archipelago is known by the aboriginal Haida Nation, is a dark, fierce place subject to frequent gale-force winds and is surrounded by exceptionally turbulent waters. The islands are separated from the mainland by a body of water appropriately named Hecate Straight. This series of ceramic vessels, Homage to Gwaii Haanas, is the result of an expedition to unknown geographical and psychological territory.

The Hecate Straight, bearing the name of the Greek goddess credited with the invention of sorcery, is a profoundly magical place. Each of the pieces in the Homage series is a composite image of a skeletal beast and a silhouette of the sorceress' collective aquatic body - bulbous swells of tangled kelp, slippery smooth and sensually arched backs, like those of the surfacing black porpoises. Her saline sanctuary is home to leviathan giants which rise, breathe and plunge back into the watery abyss. The physical place evolved into creative process; it emerged in forms that, like Hecate herself, emulate emotions left unnamed which dwell in the farthest corners of the collective unconscious.

It takes three full days of surface travel to get from Vancouver to Gwaii Haanas, a marine sanctuary within Haida Gwaii that lies just south of Alaska. The landscape on the way is somber, lush and wet. This is coastal British Columbia rainforest. The sky, land and ocean, most of the year are barely discernable shades of the same colour. Cloud meets forest meets sea in a tonal pallet of indigo. It is a climate that depresses many and inspires deep peace for others. Haida Gwaii is an extreme of this already extravagant West Coast geography. Its black basalt shore line is relentlessly pounded by unforgiving surf. Its haunting forests are precariously rooted in cavernous layers of rock cloaked with meter-thick moss. The terrain lays itself out as though personally designed by the brothers Grimm - dark shadows, twisted animate trees hung thickly with Spanish moss. If the subconscious were wilderness, this is what it would look like. Even the bedrock of this place is, like our minds!, in constant flux. This area is one of the most seismically active in Canada and there are hot springs heated by volcanic vents throughout the islands. A land forgotten by time, it exists within its own peculiar reality - dark, surreal and supremely inspirational.

In the towering spruce, in the ever-present mist, ravens play with their own echoing song. Tiny black tail deer bleat after their young. At the edge of low tide, the largest species of black bear on the North American continent laboriously overturn boulders to expose a breakfast of crabs. A myriad of bright yellow song birds flies between giant cedar boughs, and tiny green hummingbirds descend from the skies, flitting about like fairies. On the ocean the water is serene one moment and in an instant crests into three-meter-high walls of water, one after the other, to collide with our tiny ocean kayaks.

These are the unpredictable and unexpected encounters that shape the nature of a voyage in the wilderness, much the way friends, family and personal experience shape our characters. It is not the nature of the experience that affects us so much as the nature of our response. We thrive, flounder, fail or just carry on without consideration one way or another. In the open ocean, response is of the essence. We cannot ignore what we chose not to see and we must react positively to what is presented - we have to become part of the wild to live in it. Just as I breathed in the experience of the wilderness to make it a part of me, I metaphorically exhaled the experience into my work. The trip filtered down through my hands into the vessels.

This is a cathartic body of work. The extremeness of the land and ocean stimulated buried emotional responses which transmuted directly into clay. While staying within a familiar technical process, coiling and altering, there seemed to be an insuppressible urge to eviscerate, to bloat into great exaggerated swells and to pull up and flare into foliage. The resulting forms are at once sensual and grotesque. They address sexuality, the aging process and ultimately, mortality. These archetypal topics emerged by navigating through heaving ocean swells, witnessing a wilderness teaming with life and also with death. Nature, in her holistic splendor, does not disguise her terrifying aspects the way the human psyche does.

The trip and the creative process that ensued are inseparable experiences. One was a direct response to and result of the other - the cause followed by effect. A voyage into unknown territory, geographical or psychological, is always exhilarating and to a greater or lesser degree, often deeply frightening. Water conditions, like emotional responses, are frequently unpredictable and, in worst case scenarios, unnavigable. We explore the terrain of joy, doubt, caution, betrayal and other human experiences over a lifetime. The choice is ours to engage in unfamiliar experience - to risk failure or loss of love - or to remain safely ensconced in the realm of the known, never reaching deeper than the level of our own skins. Exploring the wilderness is analogous to living life meaningfully. One gathers provisions, makes plans, then launches into the open water and allows the experience to happen.

Clay is a substance like no other for manifesting subconscious thought. It requires a concurrent awareness of internal and external construction. Working with clay is for me the waking equivalent of dreaming. "We ...know that dreams have a healing function even when they are not understood. From experiments in dream laboratories we know that if we stop people from dreaming, we could even kill them. This has been seen in some animal studies as well. There are heavy physical and psychic symptoms if we wake sleepers each time they have a REM ...phase. So we know that dreams have a biologically and psychologically restorative function. They affect us positively, even when we don't understand them." (1) Creative expression is also deeply restorative.

When we are familiar with a technical process, what the clay will do between our two hands, we can release attention from the architectural concerns and focus on the personality of the piece. The creative process, if nothing else, externalizes the interior - in this case the interior was mirrored in a geographical landscape. In Jungian terms, the shadow emerged into daylight long enough to court with the animus. Seductive black Sirens wound their way up out of coils of clay almost of their own doing. They became sensual feminine incarnations of both the hideous and the exquisite aspects of that distant archipelago; they embodied exhilaration and joy as well as skeletal images of mortality. These vessels contain both the grotesque and divine aspects of the collective human spirit in a place of great uncertainty - our very existence.

Rachelle Chinnery is a ceramist living in Vancouver.