Sunday, 18 October 2026
Excerpts from Terrill Welch MA Fine Art Journal
December 31, 2024
I finished the larger “A Long Land and Sea Story” 40 x 30 inch acrylic, walnut oil and bone china on wood painting two days ago. I have left it resting to ensure I am finished with it for now. I believe it is complete but as always reserve the right to go back to it at a later date.
The title of this artwork changed along with the impact of its final rendering when the above ground became more figurative in approach while the below ground remained more abstract and flat. The more I worked on the painting, the more powerful the land and sea history became. My original working title “Bennett Bay Middens” somehow became meaningless in relation to the longer story being told. The change from the proposed abstract and figurative elements was more evolving and embedded in my making process. It is an untended surprise from engaging with materials, memory and imagination that feels and seems just right to convey a slice through time.
Completed December 29, 2024
Artist notes: Revealed is a vertical slice of earth exposed through erosion in such a way that the most of the surface of the painting has a narrow depth of field, holding space and time in the shapes of the shells and then releasing the viewer into an empty sky. For this work, flat colour is used for the aspects below ground combined that is broken by the symbolic red line and broken china with a more representational illusion of a three dimensional view above ground. The painting contains the notion of a slice of earth exposing the passage of time. I am using the red line to represent climate impacts. Broken china is used to symbolize colonialism. The final colour of sky to represent space and mood. I am asking myself – what does it mean for a white woman of European settler culture in 2024 to paint the eroding Indigenous middens from 4,000 or more years ago on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People in Canada?
It seems fitting that this is the final painting I complete in 2024 and it will also be the first painting released in 2025. I need a long story such as this right now, one that can take me past the present short days of grey skies and cold damp west coast winter drizzle.
It is easier to comprehend the size of this work if I share it in a digital room view.
I feel the weight of these coming January and early February days. I shall walk the shore of Reef Bay, paint in the studio and read about material methods, research and thinking about things in the book by Sophie Woodward. It is just six short weeks until the days are much longer and the island’s early spring begins to creep to the surface. I have a lot I want and need to do during this time. The annual deep quiet of our island during these weeks and the isolation will assist me with these tasks.
Research into Middens and Materials For Paintings
December 6, 2024
Painting from photo references and imagination with tiles screws and broken bone china at the top attached with Golden Soft Acrylic Gel Medium (archival and stays flexible) and walnut oil paint over primed cradled wood surface.
Research about another artist who broke bone china – Dana Claxton 1997 Buffalo Bone China https://www.danaclaxton.com/artwork/buffalo-bone-china
The middens remind us that the forest can be enhanced where people live or rather lived.
‘Intertidal Resource Use Over Millennia Enhances Forest Productivity’ excerpt: Human occupation is usually associated with degraded landscapes but 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia’s coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity. This is particularly the case over the last 6,000 years when intensified intertidal shellfish usage resulted in the accumulation of substantial shell middens. We show that soils at habitation sites are higher in calcium and phosphorous. Both of these are limiting factors in coastal temperate rainforests. Western redcedar (Thuja plicata) trees growing on the middens were found to be taller, have higher wood calcium, greater radial growth and exhibit less top die-back. Coastal British Columbia is the first known example of long-term intertidal resource use enhancing forest productivity and we expect this pattern to occur at archaeological sites along coastlines globally.
Soft Acrylic Gel Medium
Soft Gel Gloss can be used as a glue substitute for collage effects.
Use instructions: The acrylic medium that can also be used to great effect for collage techniques is “Golden – Soft Gel Gloss”. Instead of diluting it with water you use it neat, straight from the tub. This will be perfect to seal the pictures as well, it really is a magic medium! Either paint both sides of the image you want to collage with the medium and attach to the surface you’re working on or cover the surface with a coat of medium, stick your image on, wait for it to dry and then cover with another layer of medium to seal it.
I gathered this research about middens and materials when I did the small study in March 2024. This exploration of the Middens seems important to my sea floor series even if a I consider it slightly on the periphery of the tentative main body work. There is an aspect of a historic more mutually beneficial relationship of humans with the land that I sense can provide guidance to my work and current and future viewers who engage with this work. I think of it as a reflection point or something to consider in our acts of daily doing and being.
Reference list:
Claxton, D. (1997 [-2018]) Buffalo Bone China, Dana Claxton. Available at: https://www.danaclaxton.com/artwork/buffalo-bone-china (Accessed: 6 December 2024).
Trant, A.J. et al. (2016) ‘Intertidal resource use over millennia enhances forest productivity’, Nature Communications, 7(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12491.
