Empire of the Beetle by Andrew Nikiforuk

Author:Andrew Nikiforuk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI026000
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: 2011-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

PERHAPS NO western artist or woodsman has thought more about the meaning of the beetle than Peter von Tiesenhausen. The fifty-one-year-old is to landscape art what Ansel Adams was to photography. The son of Baltic German homesteaders, von Tiesenhausen now owns a quarter section of wooded land near Demmitt, Alberta, close to the British Columbia border in the Peace River country. He lives just a short drive from the place where the lodgepole forest of the eastern Rockies meets and melds into the jack pines that extend lazily across Canada as if on a conifer quilt. Von Tiesenhausen literally lives on the bridge that the beetle crossed to invade the boreal forest. He had a front-row seat to what the beetle Nostradamus Jesse Logan has called “a potential biogeographic event of continental scale with unknown but potentially devastating, ecological consequences implied by an invasive, native species.”

Like the writer Cormac McCarthy, von Tiesenhausen doesn’t try to explain his work. He lets his sculpture, paintings, etchings, and video start their own conversations, much like a startling landscape does. With a chain saw he often sculpts trees into stoic, muscular, larger-than-life-sized figures and then burns them. Several of these Watchers guard his property. “They’re all looking up but have no eyes,” he points out. “It’s about standing firm and being awake and aware in the moment.” He once took a crew of his Watchers right across Canada in an old pickup truck and through the Northwest Passage on a Coast Guard icebreaker. He also makes ships out of willow branches and puts odd-shaped baskets in trees. His art invites people to remember their connections to the land, which von Tiesenhausen feels should be as strong as a beetle’s ties to a pine forest. He once famously kept an oil and gas company off his property by proclaiming that his art-laden forest was protected under Canadian copyright law.

As the pine forests grew red throughout B.C., von Tiesenhausen knew his land was next in line. He created a beetle-inspired work, called Requiem, for an exhibit at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George. Using local pine pulp as a canvas and ash from beetle-killed pines as paint, he drew five hundred silhouettes of lodgepoles. Each painting represented the memory or ghost of a tree. He etched panels of plywood with a chain saw and an ax to create images of fire. He charred strips of wood, and then etched small images of Watchers. From a distance, the entire piece looks like an aboriginal pictograph. The exhibit, which was displayed in a churchlike setting, so moved the pineless people of Prince George that the city later commissioned a sculpture from von Tiesenhausen to commemorate the beetle tsunami. A five-thousand-pound iron Watcher, originally carved from a dead pine, now guards the gallery’s entrance. A twelve-foot-high bronze sculpture of a beetle-killed pine springs out of the Watcher’s head, Athena-like.

Most of the pines on Tiesenhausen’s property are dead now. He had 250 mature lodgepoles, but over three years beetle flights silenced them one by one.

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