Dutch museum displays Canadian artist’s glass-covered canoe until March
Posted Dec 31, 2015 09:39:08 AM.
Last Updated Dec 31, 2015 10:20:23 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
PETERBOROUGH, Ont. – In September, Canadian artist Brad Copping paddled his special glass-covered canoe for five days along scenic waterways in northern Europe.
A video documentary of his 150-kilometre journey shows him gliding down narrow grassy-banked channels, under low bridges and past sandy beaches that, to Copping, seemed almost tropical.
The route took him from one glass museum, GlazenHuis in Lommel, Belgium, to another, the National Glass Museum in Leerdam, the Netherlands.
The documentary, with background music by Moby, is currently being shown at the Leerdam museum, along with Copping’s “mirrored canoe.”
Copping, artist-in-residence at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ont., said the idea for the craft grew out of his experience of paddling a canoe at night under the stars, when he feels like he is “not simply a creature living in this world but a part of its very nature.”
He covered the exterior of a cedar-strip canoe with a mosaic of glass pieces depicting a map of rivers and lakes near his home in the Kawarthas region of central Ontario.
Inside the canoe, he inserted mirrored glass between the ribs. “The effect, when paddling, is of floating in the skeleton of the small vessel, sky and water joined,” he wrote in the canoe museum’s blog.
Text from his European trip journal has been etched into the mirrored interior.
Copping’s exhibit at the Dutch museum runs until March 6.
In June 2016, the artist plans a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Peterborough where the mirrored canoe will be displayed.
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On the web
Copping’s documentary: http://www.vimeo.com/146507415
Canadian Canoe Museum blog post of the canoe: http://www.canoemuseum.ca/blog
