By Hilary Peach
It's a dull day, drizzling softly when I pull up in front of a conventional looking two-story house in South Nanaimo. It's unremarkable, except for the large slabs of wood piled up in the driveway. Around the side of the house is a series of connected tent-like spaces, outdoor rooms filled with carving tools, machines, antique dental chairs, boxes, and vintage lamps. I can't tell if I'm inside or outside. It feels like a yard with a canopy over it. There's a small rock pool with a fountain, a section of cedar fence, spring flowers, mysterious objects covered in tarps. Elmo, an aged black lab, squeezes past me on his way to the ravine. In every space, it seems, there is an improvised table. Phil Ashbee pulls the plastic off of one of the tables and reveals a work in progress, a huge cedar wall panel of a salmon. Its teeth are bared, and its tail bends mightily against an invisible current. Slowly I realize that the objects covered in plastic are all pieces of art.
Ashbee is wearing a harness-mounted set of magnifying lenses on his head and a pair of glasses around his neck. He has had a tumultuous life, punctuated by artistic achievements and periods of personal crisis. He shows me a photograph of one of the highlights, a shot of Robbie Robertson performing at the Aboriginal Achievement Awards in 1998. Behind Robertson is a stunning, 16-fooot tall replica of the Transformation Man Mask Ashbee created for the occasion. "Isn't it wild?" he asks. "I'd just gotten out of the hospital when I made that." Soon I am wearing a plastic tiara, left in the studio by his daughter.
Phil Ashbee inhabits a world that is very beautiful and deeply strange, a world of his own making that seamlessly blends a myriad of influences. Disenfranchised from his family, he is a self-described black sheep, and has spent his time on earth gathering and assimilating the stories, art, and experiences that make him very much himself. Likewise, his art has grown out of an unconventional apprenticeship.
One of his most powerful early memories is of a room in a Nanaimo boarding house filled with masks and other works of art collected from the B.C. Coast. "I was about 10," he remembers. "There was this old man. He had worked for the CPR and had collected all of these artifacts from the coast, over years working for the railway. What I remember the most was the masks, the smell of them. I distinctly remember the Kwakiutl pieces and the pieces from Bella Bella, the colours, the blues. I was really young, but I remember that they were talking to me, and I could smell them, like they were alive."
The aroma of cedar and a room full of masks that spoke is enough to capture the imagination of any child, but for Ashbee this early experience was the first step in the shaping of a powerful identity. Separated from his extended family at an early age and missing the influences of his Cree elders, Ashbee has learned to take guidance from his environment and from the spirit world.
"If the masks in that room spoke to me that day then I was guided", he explains, "I never got to sit with any of my uncles and talk about anything, and I never sat with my grandfathers. The voices that speak to me come from a place that I can't describe. It's warm. It's timeless. Like you're rolling quickly over hills, and over every hill there's another visual stimulant. Like wow-wouldn't that be cool? And the frustrating part is that you can't make things as quick as you can see them, right?"
The "things" that he makes are transformation masks, memorial poles, carved glass wall panels, fish and animal sculptures that can be seen in collections and galleries around the world. Although deeply informed by tradition, the work is not bound to it. Ashbee's free-flowing sense of line is reminiscent of the work of one of his teachers, acclaimed Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, and allows his work to depart from the more abstract geometrical forms of Northwest Coast art. While retaining their totemic powers, the pieces have taken on a more contemporary sense of psychological complexity. Elements of his masks echo Indonesian, Japanese, and Maori influences, giving them a distinctly Pacific Rim flavour.
Still, Phil Ashbee is deeply attached to the mythologies of the Northwest Coast, and many of his pieces depict traditional coastal aboriginal stories. "That's the Keeper of the Drowned Souls," he says, passing me a photograph of a huge mask with a wide hooked nose and fierce-looking fish for eyebrows. "He disguises himself as a whale or a shark and lures people onto the water, then devours them… and that's Thunder Chum," he explains, handing me another picture. This one is a cedar salmon with a strip of large red roe visible in the underbelly and abalone inlay adorning the gill flap. "Thunder Chum is both male and female. He can do incredible things. He can swim up streams that have no water in them, and he can smash right through your fishing boat."
The stories have inspired Ashbee to work in many media, switching easily between wood, glass, metal and photography. He incorporates organic materials such as abalone, dentalia shells, bone, teeth, owl feathers, swan quills, mountain goat fur, cedar bark, and wild horsehair with yellow and red cedar, tooled copper, and bronze.
Thirty years ago other materials spoke to Ashbee, those of the construction trades. He had a contract to build an aeration tower for the Nanaimo River Hatchery. He convinced the client to change the blueprints, and to discard the conventional clad-board siding in favour of cedar shakes. "And we put skylights up in the tower," he recalls. "I fused coloured glass beads to these little skylights, so when you look up instead of this dark tower you see water - all this water lit up with coloured light and falling down through the tower. It was unreal. I always wanted to make artistic alterations, to leave my fingerprint on things."
Ashbee hasn't worked as a contractor in nearly two decades, and the day I visit him his enthusiasm for artwork is contagious. He has just accepted an invitation to represent Nanaimo at the national Canada Day celebrations in Ottawa. As we talk he assembles photographs of his work, requested by the National Arts Centre for a possible 2009 exhibit. There is also discussion of a casting project in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And while it seems as though he is on the cusp of breaking onto the international scene in a big way, Ashbee is focused on his new project: he has just completed a dozen molds, the second phase (after carving the blanks out of wood) for a set of bronze castings painstakingly made using the lost-wax method.
I become drowsy and realize the afternoon is slipping away. It's time to go. The unassuming Nanaimo house has turned out to be full of surprises, and so has the artist who lives and works there. Elmo comes in, soaking wet, and stretches out in a drift of wood shavings. As we say goodbye, Phil Ashbee slips a small, framed print of a bear mask into my bag, like a blessing.
