Moorland Productions were awarded a funded five-week residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada in 2023.
​
The work produced there dealt with the multiple cultural traditions contributing to the development of tea culture in Canada, through digital print, photography, sound, video, ceramic and three-D printing, and site-specific wall drawing.

​

The 14 metre wall drawing in silver tape traced the topography of the surrounding Rocky Mountains round the studio space. This drawing linked and traversed the seven digital collages representing seven different cultures, and is a physical component/compositional element of three of the prints.  On the third studio wall, a painted representation of the Bow River carries paper boats filled with tea, and pictograms of boats using tea as a developer, into Banff.

​

The Great Western Railroad train, carrying grain across Canada is represented in a video with digitally enhanced soundtrack, periodically echoing through the installation space.  On the back wall, the Chinese characters for 'Mountain' and 'Water', together spell 'Landscape'. The studio installation takes place literally between the mountains and the river, with the sound of the Harvest grain train resounding through the valley.

​

Ceramic tea vessels, a digitally printed tea vessel combining both Mountain and Water pictograms, and a 'Deconstructed' tea vessel pay homage to the cultural importance of ceramics in the propagation of tea culture.

​

Lastly, a series of "Cake Mountain" digital collages pays humorous homage to the splendid sculptural forms of the Banff pastry chef's creations, finding homologies with the forms of the Rocky Mountains.

 

Click here to see an: On-line catalogue: