Ebb and Flow - Part 1

I'm Michael Belmore. I'm Anishnaabe from Northern Ontario and this work Ebb and Flow is my creation. 

It is a series of carved rocks, carved boulders, erratics. They are stones that were found on the property. They are stones that were moved here by glaciers long before people were here ‎and they settled in this place before this park, before these buildings we risen from the ground. And so it sort of mirrors how we exist in this world that we come from afar, that we are a gathering of stones in a way. 

And if you look closely at each of the individual rocks, they all have their own character‎. They have their own colours and textures. And we know them in one phase of their life, but they had a phase before that, an existence before that where they were liquid. And they were ebbing and flowing like water. And you can see that in the textures of the stone on how these lines of different materials, different like feldspar, how it's gathered, how it's cooled, how it's compressed. And you can see that ebb and flow if you look deeply at the details in the stones themselves you can see that history of them moving and being free. 

And they were once attached to the Canadian Shield in different places. And they've all ended up here through different processes, through erosion, through glaciation, most often by water. So in a way my carving is adding to the conversation that already exists on the stone, already is in the stone. And very mush the intention is to have these swirls and curls. And it's just sort of how you imagine water flowing over rocks. I wanted to have that touch.