Already tired from walking to the museum, I entered the front door, presented my student card and hung up my coat. I resisted the temptation to visit the interesting art clothing on display in the museum shop.
I had pre-decided to visit the ceramic gallery where I had seen some intriguing objects a few years ago. I was sure I would find something worthy of writing about.
I did find my object but it became embedded in a full experience of reverie during the visit. The name on the door “Koerner” brought me back to another gallery, an opening one summer evening when I had met Koerner, then in his nineties and still creating large contemporary landscape paintings. He would not have remembered me but I was able to see the one whose paintings I had seen and loved around the city.
I entered the quiet space feeling relieved that I was alone. I had a lot going on in my life and this I knew would give me some time to take a staycation from my personal challenges. Right away, the grey space calmed my agitation. My breathing was like that of coming across an old friend, both fast and slow at the same time.
I asked myself what I would choose of so many objets d’art from different countries and centuries for my treasure of the day. I had gone only a few feet in and instinctively turned to the lit space on the left. Central to the glass case were plates with roses on them. As I clomped across the floor with my heavy winter boots I spied with my little eye a plate that would have been at home in my grandmother’s house — but not on the table or on the wall like a painting. My grandmother’s bedroom was filled with large pink cabbage roses so completely dwarfing the bed that it felt like a real secret garden to me as a child.
Now this bed was no ordinary bed, whatever it looked like. Twelve (more than twelve) children had been conceived there. One of them was my late beloved mother. This roséd room, it came to me, was in the back corner of an unfamiliar and unusual house.
There was a TV in the living room where I watched “Huckleberry Hound” and heard Don Messer’s Jubilee play instead of the usual bagpipes of the Scottish town house I came from. This house had a pump that had to be primed in order to get any water for cooking or for wash day. It had a huge black wood stove for making bread and pies. Those delectable love offerings were waiting for us when we came in.
To this day, I have never had in my mouth such flaky texture and pure sourdough delight. We ate politely off good dishes there. The plates and teacups had these pink and green roses too. I knew I was in a special place with someone my mother dearly loved.
As the months wore on during our staying with my grandmother it felt like another land (which it was). In my grandmother’s yard there was a well with a bucket and a silver ladle for us to drink cool clean water from. In my grandmother’s forest there was a pine-needled walk which we could not veer from as there was real quick sand in the clearings there.
In my grandmother’s back yard, there was a hill where I skied for the first time leaving waxed cranberry-coloured marks in the snow. Over the hill was a cliff overlooking a surrealist landscape of mud-covered biomorphic forms when the king tides went out each day, so I was told (I did not actually see this until I returned to the Maritimes decades later).
Across from my grandmother’s house was a large rectangular trailer-like house on concrete blocks. Around this house, we were warned, was an electric fence to keep animals both in and out.
Down the steep road from my grandmother’s house was a deep storm sewer with a sidewalk on each side under the road. This black water held our darkest fears (Many years later at art school this image came to me to be painted.)
In my grandmother’s town was the school where I first experienced being mocked. It was a brain-puzzling experience for me because I had no idea why they were repeating every thing I said (It was as an adult too that I realized that this was their response to my Scottish accent).
It was in re-visiting my grandmother’s rose-gardened bedroom after her funeral that I realized who I was. I was born here too in a city nearby.
I went to no other cabinets that day at the museum in the Koerner European Gallery. It was a long visit but I did not get far. My gaze was fixed on rose plates. My mind was playing back memories of other roses and gradually came back to the beautiful pink delicately painted plate.
Harpsichord music, appropriate to both to this 19th century time period and my grandmother’s days of new wallpaper, played so quietly that I had to become accustomed to the room before it was noticed. The room was surprisingly hot. In view of the strong hissing sound of the temperature control system and the many concentric-circled vents in the ceiling, this room of ceramics, no matter how old and valuable, would have been well-cared for with less effort.
A security guard entered the doors with a subdued whooshing sound. I was no longer alone. As he entered I left to be back in the sunny main hall filled with tour guides, teachers and small children. When I enter a gallery I never know where I will re-visit.
- Deborah Stephan, Burnaby
You can learn more about Deborah Stephan on her art studio and writing blogs.
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