IN STUDIO

WITH GUTHRIE GLOAG

CAST in WOOD

Driftwood sculptures depict coastal species

WORDS SEAN MCINTYRE, PHOTOGRAPHY TOBYN ROSS + MADRONA GALLERY

Like many of us, Guthrie Gloag has spent recent weeks and months navigating challenges and changes. There’ve been “how-tos” about homeschooling his daughter, carving out time for work and searching for signs of hope in a new reality.

Unlike others, presumably, Guthrie and his family have experienced social isolation and physical distancing at their Bowen Island home with a life-size Roosevelt elk.

The imposing driftwood sculpture was the centrepiece of Guthrie’s July show at Victoria’s Madrona Gallery, but undertaking the migration required help from a team of human helpers.

The elk may have been stranded in Guthrie’s studio because of the pandemic, but it was also born and raised in the outbreak: proof that adversity can present opportunity. The project was inspired by a set of antlers, resting among the sketches and stacks of drying driftwood in Guthrie’s workshop. He has long known that the set of six-point antler sheds would someday figure into a major project, but he’s never given himself time to grab them off the shelf and get to work. Until earlier this year, that is, when daily routines were thrown into flux.

“Honestly, the whole [COVID-19] experience has been quite overwhelming,” he says. “Delving into a large project that I could immerse myself in and thinking less about the stresses of our current time has been a great distraction. I find that when I’m in the studio, I feel inspired. It’s a place where I can focus.”

It’s not surprising that Guthrie should find calm in his work. It’s this sense of balance that drew him to the craft while he undertook a bachelor of science degree in biology at the University of Victoria. He says he lacked the knack for painting and didn’t have the patience for more traditional sculpture. But his future became clear when he began to gather and assemble pieces of driftwood collected along the shores of the Salish Sea.

“I realized no one is bad at art, they just haven’t found their medium,” he says.

The driftwood sculptures he would assemble and often leave standing on beaches in the Gulf Islands began to mysteriously dis- appear. Guthrie figured he was on the right track to discover his medium if people were willing to hike out true-to-scale wooden eagles and black bears from remote beaches. Galleries soon began to take notice of his work and the emerging artist found himself featured in exhibitions and media across the province.

Guthrie made front-page news for an impressive and thought-provoking work known as the Mastodon Project. The effort saw him haul countless loads of driftwood along a rocky path to build a 14-foot-tall, mammoth-like beast in a remote, undisclosed public location. Ten thousand years after the great mammals became extinct in North America, Guthrie’s wooden mastodon still stands tall in its forest setting. It inspires reflections on a forgotten age, while provoking thoughts of the vertiginous contrast between human existence and the depth of natural history among unsuspecting hikers.

A life spent observing nature through a biologist’s lens along BC’s coastlines has provided Guthrie with an intimate knowledge of his subjects. Each creature is imbued with a distinctively magical sense of motion, wrought by the specific properties of each piece of driftwood. Curve, colour and texture bring Guthrie’s creations to life as though the observer is glimpsing these majestic creatures in their natural habitat.

Instilling a sense of wonder and awareness is, after all, central to Guthrie’s motivation. By transporting animals from the depths of a coastal forest into an urban gallery space or a collector’s home, the artist strives to spark a sense of curiosity and respect for the natural world. It is through this, Guthrie adds, that one can hope to understand and begin to reflect upon the precarious nature of the sensitive ecosystems we are privileged to live among.

“My art is a very small part of just trying to help people understand that we can make decisions that can help the world,” he says.