Dreamwork of the Whales - Part 2

Well, why don’t I go through the story from the beginning. The artwork that you’re looking at was carved by a group of people predominantly from Ontario. And in Vancouver we were all members of an informal, but very hard working guild of wood sculptors called the Ne Chi Zu Guild, a local aboriginal phrase that means, “To see oneself through the eyes of another.” It was formed in the aftermath of the Habitat for Humanity Conference in Vancouver, which was held in 1975. And in 1979 we organized essentially our return to Toronto to execute our masterpiece, which under the guild system is what you do at the conclusion of your studies. 

So Lynn Daly and I came up really with the idea of carving a pole in Toronto as our masterpiece. And when we went to an exhibit at the Harbourfront Contemporary Art Gallery, we approached the gallery director, whose name was Anita Aarons, was quite a famous figure in the Toronto art community, and interestingly she immediately agreed. But we had a lot of trouble getting enough money to even support us while we were doing the work. But interestingly as soon as we actually started working it attracted a lot of attention, to the point that we had to put a low fence all around the site for crowd control. And they started bringing school groups and so we got a lot of donations including a site trailer and cases of spaghetti sauce and pasta from a grocery store. And neighbours would drop off giant trays of lasagne and so on. So there was definitely zeal amongst us.

So we carved the piece through the summer, it was a lot of work. You know we roughed the piece out originally with chain saws and then, but the vast majority of the work was done with axes, adzes and chisels, large chisels, most of which I made. Essentially after the pole was completed, it was raised by about five hundred people. We put out a call on CBC and maybe other channels as well and a gross excess of people showed up. And I had designed a hoisting rig and so we had a rope that went all the way down the field and then all the way back down the field. And these people gathered along this rope and just started pulling, and the thing went up in no time. The day of the raising, by the way, Mendelson Joe, who was a well-known musician at the time, played at the raising of the pole. You know we had a BBQ after, yeah, and we got lots of press, it was featured in all of the newspapers. And so it was a tremendous event, I mean it was like a, like it was supposed to be. 2:54