During a visit to a ruined ancestral Mennonite village in Ukraine, flooded to dam the Dnieper River, Shirley Wiebe found only an uncanny staircase deposited on the river bank. The form of this eerie architectural feature—disconnected from its initial location and function—serves as a mnemonic surrogate for obliterated place and the flight from persecution.
This body of work began during a Berlin art residency following the artist’s research, and more recently has continued in Vancouver. Follow a Path to the River reflects on what is not a unique occurrence, but one that is experienced over and over. Leaving everything behind to start anew. The exhibition invites viewers to follow shifting perspectives exploring themes of displacement, endurance and identity through drawing, photography, sculpture, video and music. Shirley Wiebe’s practice examines how memory is bound up in place and landscape through layered and composite viewpoints; how structures, objects and materials have agency to convey history and meaning; to spark personal and collective memory.
Follow a Path to the River will be on view in the Project Gallery from May 19 - July 1, 2023.
Please join us on June 8th from 5-6pm for an online Artist Talk with the artist. Details and registration can be found here!
As a supplement to the exhibition, Shirley Wiebe has also recorded a song titled Follow a Path to the River, which you can listen to here.
Interpretive essay courtesy of the artist.
The Staircase
Essay by Fae Logie © April 23, 2023
“Did you feel an ache for the village beneath the water when you were standing on the riverbank?” I ask.
“Yes and no,” Shirl responds, “My maternal grandparents had left the site long before the Dnieper River was flooded.”
We sit side by side in Shirl’s art studio with the window ajar. Semi-trucks gear up along Clarke Street, hauling cargo from the Vancouver Harbour to points south. Today the white painted studio appears like a gallery, an installation of photographic works juxtaposed with multitudes of drawings of various sizes, shapes, and materials. Everything is carefully curated and positioned from low to the floor to almost ceiling height. It is a narrative of inquiry imbued with a sense of timelessness.
“When did you work on these?” I ask.
“After my journey to central Ukraine in 2009. My grandparents were part of a Mennonite colony along the river, back in the late 1800s.”
Having collaborated or critiqued each other’s art for many years, I intuit Shirl’s process. Her interest is in finding unexpected encounters in the environment, places of transition and flux, and recreating a sense of “coming across it” for the viewer. Things of day-to-day life are transformed into iconographies of memory. They take shape, often using what is at hand in the landscapes, to define an ephemeral presence.
A staircase, in its many configurations, dominates this visual field. As I look closer, I realize every artwork incorporates elements of steps, representing a continuum between figurative and abstraction. “Is there a specific meaning you associate with staircases?” I ask.
“There are so many,” Shirl responds, “My work explores inter-relationships between the built environment and physical geography. Staircases are part myth, part dream, part faery tale. I see them as symbolic of a passageway between two things: places, ideas, or states of being.”
One enlarged grainy photographic montage, six feet in width, realistically depicts a concrete set of stairs resting on the river’s edge. It is an incongruous image, alluding to a structure floating in space. Perpendicular to the flowing river, it could lead down to the submerged settlement, or as I see it, feeling a pull towards the dark fluvial waters, a hidden meaning below. I envision myself standing on the bottom step, water lapping at the soles of my feet, then plunging down against the cold current to see a glint off the arched windows of the Mennonite Brethren Church, blurred through the polluted murkiness. Yet all evidence would be gone.
Shirl pulls me back from my reverie. “My grandparents left Andraesfeld long before the damning of the Dnieper River in 1930. It was part of Russia at that time. They left for other reasons.”
Her alert eyes regard me behind round blue frames, pondering my perspective on impermanence. My own art practice is deeply embedded in an attachment to objects and place.
“It is not in the Mennonite’s belief system to hold onto worldly belongings - a house, a shed for cattle or a plot of land. As a devout colony, my grandparents would have found connection in faith and community. As an ethnic sect, they moved throughout history, persecuted, and expelled from one country to leave for another.”
“Why did they leave Andraesfeld?” I ask.
“In 1874, Russia passed an act that made it compulsory for all young men to do military service. This would have conflicted with their central tenet of pacifism as a way of life.”
My gaze drifts back to the walls, pausing to take in intimate sketches on vellum that render elements of stairs in graphic detail: yellowish brown steps descending into a charcoal pool; a handrail attached to a watery smudge; lines made by machine stitched thread expanding out in varying proportions of riser and tread, defying gravity; swirls of black thread cascading down steps like a rushing torrent. Repetition of the stair motif distorts and collapses in on itself, the materiality escaping into an abstract body or organic blobs of pinkish diluted blood.
Partially hidden behind a worktable, a pink diaphanous sculpture peeks out. It holds its hollow form in stillness. On closer inspection, it defines three distinct steps in human scale, a volumetric expansion of thin flexible plastic sheets, pierced together with metal rings. As I reach out to place my palm lightly on its uppermost surface, it jingles and jiggles. I look back at the pink blob sketches, watercolour leeching out to wrap around an outline of geometric shapes, the piercing rings floating in space like punctuation marks.
“We’ll come back to that,” Shirl says, as I turn to her.
“Tell me about the day you went to the Dnieper River,” I ask.
Shirl looks away. Her hands begin to delicately move in line with her words, as if placing connecting images in a finite order.
It is a day in late May, the weather warm enough that she wears a t-shirt. Shirl has arranged for a translator and a driver to act as local guides. As they leave Zaporizhzhia, Ludmilla, petite in the wide front seat of the sedan, speaks to the driver, Dimitri, his thick tanned hands lightly cradling the steering wheel. They are both at least a decade younger than Shirl, now in her mid-fifties, but today she doesn’t feel the elder.
Ludmilla, tucking her straight blonde hair behind an ear, turns to face Shirl. “I have arranged for lunch in a small village. Its baker will provide for us,” she says. Her accent is familiar to Shirl as it mixes with faint music seeping from the car radio. Leading tours, especially foreigners searching for remnants of their Mennonite roots, is what Ludmilla and Dimitri do, though they have never had a solo client and an artist at that. Easing into the drive ahead, they know to find a common language, not only to use English, but to allow for the day to unfold as circumstances present themselves.
Once out of the city, they detour onto rural backroads, most paved, some not, weaving between cultivated fields extending from settlements of corrugated roofed houses and outbuildings. Shirl notices women her age working in their makeshift yards, chickens running about, fencing materials of this and that, worn outdoor tables accumulating pots and tools, every surface functioning in a seemingly haphazard way. These women remind Shirl of her mother with their weathered, yet radiating faces, and her mother’s life given to preparing sustenance from the land: butchering chickens, milking cows, planting and harvesting gardens, putting up preserves.
As they pass through one village, Dimitri slows and stops in front of a slate grey single-story house. A middle-aged woman comes out of her gate to greet them. She wears a loose blue pattern scarf knotted at the nape of her neck. Without words, she takes in Shirl’s face with an inquisitive grin. After brief introductions, Ludmilla asks in Ukrainian, “May I show Shirl the remnants of Mennonite buildings in your yard?”
“Tak,” the woman replies, leading the way through overgrown grasses that scratch at Shirl’s bare ankles. Segments of tawny free-standing walls rise like monuments, the thick handmade bricks exposed where the mortar has fallen off. “This was a school,” the woman says in Ukrainian, “and over here the earth was dug out to provide for cold storage.” Ludmilla translates as Shirl stands in what would have been the interior, her hand pressing against the uneven texture of flaking masonry.
“It means a lot to me that people living here now know and remember the history of the Mennonite’s presence on this land.” Shirl says to Ludmilla, who in turn relays this message to the present owner as they slowly walk back to the car.
Late morning, they arrive at their intended destination, as close as they will get to the former site of Andraesfeld. From the parked car, Shirl sees a few distant farmhouses, but no further vestiges of an absent ancestry. Is this it? she asks herself, the outcome of a thumbtack defining a spot on a map determined from months of planning?
“Can we get out and walk?” Shirl asks.
“Yes, of course!”
The day’s heat presses in like a vacant yearning picking at Shirl’s resolve, moisture beading on her palms. She knows there must be more, something of being here and now, in the present. Shirl spots the river a short distance away.
“I want to get to the river,” she exclaims. Ludmilla and Dimitri follow, aware by now that Shirl has her own ideas.
Silver poplar and linden trees dot the steppe to the water but mostly it is low growing deciduous shrubs, fescue, and feather grasses. An arid scent infuses the air; a nostalgic pang quickens in Shirl for the prairie of her childhood home in southern Saskatchewan. Approaching the low dip of the riverbank, her footing shifts in the loose sand.
Immediately in view is a concrete staircase set apart from any architectural reference. Utilitarian in appearance, it provides no purpose. Its bulk departs the sandy bank at the top elongated step, balancing at a slant, a black shadow cast beneath. Shirl counts eleven steps. A smooth round handrail is perched along one side, curved at both ends, to aid in an assuming descent into the water, or the opposite, an ascension from the swirling greyish blue undertow. She feels an irresistible beckoning. This marvelous object is fraught with symbolism and metaphor, ceremoniously placed like a beached whale, something that has died and washed up, still intact and solid.
For all Shirl’s research and preparations, she couldn’t have imagined this outcome. Not realizing what she had been looking for, she has come upon where she needs to be, like meeting someone you feel you have known all your life, a sudden swooning in her body, an elation. The staircase does not make sense, neither the impossible physicality of it nor the hunger it feeds. It is a treasure, a tangible artefact, the gesture of a gift. Now, she has something to go by. Everything feels to be changing.
Ludmilla and Dimitri observe from a respectful distance, eyeing an approaching small boat. Two young couples land at the base of the stairs, boisterously calling out. Ludmilla intervenes in Ukrainian. “This woman is an artist from Canada. She is here to explore the village of her mother’s parents, now beneath the river here.”
“Come out with us,” one of the men says in English, whereby they all start waving encouragement. Shirl starts towards them, full of letting go of who she is in the moment, what even her purpose is here, suddenly open to all possibilities.
Ludmilla intervenes again. “This is not a good idea. They have been drinking.”
Dimitri also steps forward. “Sorry, but we must be going soon.”
Shirl watches the boat depart, both cherishing the notion of being on the river and of staying with her staircase. She turns around, still in the object’s mystery, longing to stretch out the length of the steps’ inert surface, allowing the warmth of her limbs to transfer into its materiality, to feel the bite of each stair imprint her spine. The handrail calls for her to reach out, gripping her fingers around its girth like a handshake, never to let go. Shirl’s wish is to remain, to be alone with her thoughts.
“We should be moving on,” Dimitri reinstates.
Shirl, realizing all will be lost, takes out her camera, stepping back to frame the staircase from a side view, the river spanning to a horizon of cropped hills, then sky. Will evidence of this unknowable be captured? she asks herself. Will an image be able to fill the void?
The visit is over too soon. Her longing to stay conflicts with the retreating backs of her guides, intent now on the luncheon date. Shirl runs to catch up, flopping into the back seat then turning to watch through the rear window until the staircase is out of site. The Beatles song, “Two of Us” is playing quietly on the radio. She hums the chorus, about home, going home.
What is home? she mulls over to herself.
Shirl closes the studio window to the afternoon breeze, pausing in her telling. Slender fingers hang outstretched at her sides, a look of introspection flits across her forehead.
I walk to the far wall to attend more closely to a miniature set of stairs protruding into the space. It is a perfect scale replica of the Dnieper staircase, about twenty inches in length, made of grey cardstock and speckled with paint to give the impression of concrete.
Shirl speaks up. “I completed about half of these works during a three-month artist residency in Berlin, late in the same year after my time in Ukraine. Then the remainder once I returned to Vancouver.”
“Why Berlin?” I ask, still somewhat distracted by the tiny staircase, its attention to detail not going unnoticed.
“The opportunity for the art residency arose. It struck me as a perfect place to divulge my research, integrating aspects of my German heritage with my observations from Ukraine. My affinity to the iconic shape of the staircase had a chance to incubate in the intervening months.”
“Tell me about how you used this model as a device,” I ask.
“It became a means to engage with Berlin, placing it in situ as a performative act. At first, I was conscious of recreating a plausible reading, framing the placements such that the resulting photographs would appear in realistic perspectival space. Then, I pushed further towards the limits of possibility.” Shirl points to a few of the photographs that capture contradictory scale and angles; in some the steps hang precariously in mid-air.
“I titled this series, ‘Treppe’,” Shirl interjects, “German for staircase. In part I was intrigued by the notion of the staircase as an architectural threshold between opposing spaces. The found staircase hinted at a disconnection, a severance from the building it once served. I embraced the brokenness and lack of purpose. It became a construct with which to examine separation, displacement, identity, and place.”
I had been interpreting many of the photographs as actual staircases in the urban landscape. Now I see that all these images are fabrications, the model staircase making its cameo appearance without fail. Prominent sites of Berlin are recognizable, beckoning from the backgrounds, the former SS headquarters building, partially in ruin, or a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall with its signature graffiti face. But others involve ambiguous sites, underground rail stations, vacant interiors, watercourses, each in tandem with the cropped stand-in.
“Tell me more about your experiences in Berlin,” I inquire.
Shirl wakes in the bare rectangular room. White walls, grey painted floor, heavy white molding framing two large windows divided into four square panes. Dawn light defines two identical sets of squares creeping up the opposite wall. Below the windows the white painted radiators gurgle to wakefulness. Shirl has moved most of the room’s furnishings to the hallway, including the bed frame. All that remains is an imitation wood table, two chairs, and a mattress on the floor. She prefers it this way, to be unencumbered during this time by the past lives of objects.
The smell of new PVC plastic counters a slight pervasive mustiness. In the shadow of the far corner, the bulky sculptural form of thick pink skin masquerades as a low rise of steps. It came together quickly, still raw in its presence. What is my relationship to this new thing? Shirl asks herself. Yet the title “HOST” has already attached itself, as in holding or accommodating.
Pinned above the sculpture, high on the end wall is an enlarged black-and-white copy of the photograph she took of the staircase next to the Dnieper River. On the other end wall is a drawing surface made up of fifteen sheets of 300-gram watercolour paper taped together from the back and mounted as a grid. The composite stretches over eight feet tall by six feet wide. Beginning work on it the day she arrived, Shirl’s intention is to mark time over this month of thirty days, plotting her psychic passage through the city. She studies the initial laying of vermillion red and ochre swatches in broad arm sweeping strokes, details of graphite lines cupping a distinct edge of apple green, drips flowing uninhibited. A delicate wooden ladder leans against the wall next to the drawing, a means of gaining height to reach the upper half. It was the final concession to the useful things she allowed to remain in the studio, harbouring something of the staircase’s liminal structure to get from one point to another, up and down, and up again.
Shirl rises and dresses in the dim light.
Outside the air is cold, the day greying with promised rain. Shirl sets out along Kopenhagener Straße, as she has every day so far, stopping first at a favourite coffee shop around the corner.
Berlin’s frenetic pulse quickens her pace. She lets intuition guide her trajectory rather than a set plan. The act of walking is a key element to her art practise, whether at home or in the unchartered territories of elsewhere. She perceives a nostalgic rumination to these wanderings, acknowledging a melancholic past pushing in on her thoughts. Berlin is a city whose social fabric beats in conflicting turmoil. It both distracts from and awakens in her losses she carries, finding a restless solace in the city’s struggles.
Wrapped in plastic, the cardstock staircase is a reassuring object tucked in Shirl’s backpack. A side street discloses a row of unopened storefronts, the day still early. In one, a mannequin stands with arms stiff at her sides, confronting Shirl. Its plain formal attire gives an impression of authority; from simple tailored cuffs, hands hang lifelike, pale, the fingers slightly bent. Shirl stares at them.
As a young child, the palms of Shirl’s hands held a power over her gaze. She would see them as other than herself, later referring to it as “hand staring”. There was an element of fear involved. She took care to not overdo this activity, to not become desensitized to the feeling it evoked, understanding even as a child it would serve her, its seed developing into an acute sensitivity to the world around her.
Shirl unwraps the model and presses its length to the window. There is an immediate interchange, the stairs reflection erasing the solidity of the mannequin’s dark torso, the pale hands left unscathed, like a ghost trying not to be seen. With one hand supporting the model she takes a hasty photograph. Unnerved by the interaction, she hurries on.
Brandenburg Gate looms in the near distance. Crowds are funneling through to witness the date, the 20th year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Shirl turns instead to enter the pastoral Tiergarten park, consciously refuting a desire to investigate the plaza until later.
Pungent decomposing leaf litter lures her as she disturbs a congregation of geese, their fluttering squawks beating overhead. Meandering pathways break into damp grassy fields. Shirl veers towards a maze of enveloping thickets, trickling sounds of water enticing her further afield. The spot she is looking for will make itself known. Reflecting patterns of dark and light cast by bare branches of hovering oaks and chestnuts signal a haptic terrain. A hushing solitude embraces a bucolic pool, a reservoir for mourning.
Shirl selects a stick to support her cardboard staircase, balancing it cautiously on the sandy substrate. She crouches down. Her camera viewfinder slowly pans back and forth; the grey rigidness of the stairs imposes its dominant stance as she moves it further and further out of the frame. Back and forth until her eye detects a sharp edge between truth and fiction. A sense of the impossible recaptured? She moves the placement. Tries again. And again. Click.
Exiting the park, amplified music and voices assault as Shirl enters the mass pulsing within the cordoned off streets. Her energy shifts to that of the crowd, reading facial expressions, catching snippets of German and English, narrowing in on smells of grease and boiled sugar. “Look,” she says, pointing up. Everyone is looking up.
Articulated wings span out from dark statue-like figures crowning the buildings. Ha, she laughs to herself, the Berlin film, “Wings of Desire”. Just yesterday, she scoured the Staatbibliothek with her model, staging it amongst the book stacks, the very place the film was shot in 1987. Everything feels to be connecting. This is my Berlin, she thinks. The angel actors float down on cables, animating their silver feather appendages, their long coats and hair covered in chalky grey dust.
A reoccurring dream finds purchase as Shirl walks back over the George-C.-Marshall- Brücke at dusk. The dream is always about living in a city where she has never been, yet knowing the streets and buildings as if it were home. She pauses, scanning the River Spree, its arterial course pulling at the memory of her dream. Is Berlin her oneiric city?
At the threshold of the residency building, warmth calls Shirl in, her body weary. In the second-floor kitchen, greetings from the other six international residents are exchanged. “How was your day?” “What did you do?” “What did you see?” She sits for a moment accepting a cup of tea, then retreats to her studio.
Shirl goes to the wall drawing, climbing the first few rungs of the ladder. Reaching out with her left hand, her pencil traces the day’s unfolding without conscious thought or reason, whatever comes to mind. Marks rapidly overlay the thin washes: images of boards torn apart, falling into oblivion; a pole or stake piercing an organic shape, an edible treat, or a wounded limb; the outline of an animal, its pointed snout raised in a scream.
There is a knock at the door. “Is this a good time?” Trina asks, poking her face in, a wide eager face delineated by blunt bangs partially obscuring her eyes. Trina is one of the other artists, coming to Berlin from South Korea. She wears a blue terrycloth robe.
“Yes, come in. Please.” Shirl steps down from the ladder. Going into the far corner she gingerly carries out the pink stair sculpture, its metal rings announcing its placement at the centre of the room.
“I think of this as a social sculpture,” Shirl explains, “one that finds completion only by its ability to be engaged with.”
“Ok,” Trina says, her voice cautious.
“Interreact in any way you want, but as agreed, I want to document the process.”
Trina walks to the form. Circumnavigating it, her bare feet land and push off, land, and push off, slowly, soundlessly. She stops. Considering. Slipping off her robe, she pulls her nightgown over her head. Both garments lay on the floor discarded. Naked, she squats down. Her hands slip beneath the fluorescent edging, limbs lowering, heels pressing back, toes poised, her body stretching out, palms lifting the lip of the hollow form over her head, her torso slithering in, her back rounding, her legs extending into the lowest step.
Pinkness contains the body, the structure holds, shelters. Everything is tinted pink and red, blood, and flesh, as in a womb. Without warning, the grace of Trina’s gesture moves Shirl. She lowers the camera as tears crest the dam of her eyelids.
“Don’t cry.” Trina stands beside her, robed. “Don’t cry.”
The noise diminishing from Clarke Street indicates rush hour traffic is easing. Shirl pulls down the blinds as the daylight beyond her studio window fades.
“There is another thing I want to show you,” Shirl says, taking a tattered bound book from a box at her feet. “This is my mother’s hymnal. She died soon after I returned from Berlin.”
I accept the fragile offering, opening it, its binding hesitant as if imparting pain. Words stray up from the verses, imagery of rocks, rivers, hills, trees, the word ‘wonder’.
“Was singing a choral tradition in Mennonite culture?” I ask.
“Yes. Long after my mother could no longer communicate due to dementia, she would sit with a hymn book on her lap, singing the words as she traced the lines.”
Shirl hands me an image of handmade papers worked onto copper sheeting. “One more thing,” she says smiling. It is obviously a new work in progress. Disfigured step shapes traverse horizontally but they are almost undefinable, as if Shirl is allowing the staircase to finally be released into the encircling blue paper. Abutting the blueness are torn scraps of a hymnal, musical notations, notes, and rests with bars serving as both ripples in the water, or lines in the sand. A path along a river.
“I gave myself permission to use pages from my mother’s hymnal, wanting her hand in the work. She provided me with a way to continue following this path, developing ideas as a form of devotion.”
Shirley Wiebe is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver BC. Born and raised in a rural Saskatchewan farming community, Shirley's work is informed by a strong childhood bond with the prairie landscape. Her installation and sculptural work explores relationships between physical geography and the built environment, with a particular interest in site-specific and project-based work.
Wiebe has participated in a number of international art residencies as an opportunity to initiate projects and new bodies of work with materials she discovers there. She has created site-specific installations in national public art galleries and sculpture parks throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Learn more about Wiebe and her work, here.
As a Canadian visual artist Fae Logie’s practice operates within the registers of the scientific and the poetic, the conceptual and the environmental. Embracing elements of sculpture, drawing, photography and text, the diversity of her visual output adheres to processes of critical observation and research. Logie lives and works on Bowen Island where she is part of a co-housing. She has an MFA degree from the University of British Columbia, though initially she studied science, a discipline that continues to inform her work. This year Logie is enrolled in ‘The Writer’s Studio’, at Simon Fraser University, writing in both fiction and non-fiction.