The year 2014 marked a shift in New Westminster-based artist Marney-Rose Edge's artworks. It was the year Edge started working out of the historic Parker Street Studios in Vancouver; and it was also the year, she dove into painting nests — nests with smooth round eggs resting in them.
All of them will be on display at her studio at the 26th Eastside Culture Crawl, between Nov. 17 and 20.
The subject of nests was a ways from the delicate flowers that Edge was used to creating oil, watercolour, and acrylic paintings of; but there was something that pushed Edge to create not just one, but a full-blown series of nests.
“I was thinking we [Edge and her partner] were going to be empty nesters fairly soon,” she recalled of the time she made her first nest painting. Though her son moved out only seven years later, in the meantime, Edge ended up creating a mini series of 10 paintings that captured the emotion around being an empty nester.
During this time, coincidentally, Edge also started attracting nests.
To paint her first nest, Edge had bought a fake one from Garden Works; but ever since, she said, “people started gifting me nests that they found either in their gardens or elsewhere." She got two from Gambier Island, a Robin's nest from Vancouver, and yet another tiny one that looked like it’s made with "dog hair", among others.
A total of seven nests found their way to her studio without Edge having to lift a finger; and ironically, despite all the toil to attract birds into her own garden, she has found no nests all these years.
Born in New Zealand, Edge has travelled and lived around the world — in Australia, England and Chicago — before settling in New Westminster. “This was so much like New Zealand to me. I didn't need to go anywhere else,” she said.
In 2003, she bought a 1937-built house here, and over the years, filled it with porcelain dolls, Victorian purses, parasols, mason jars, jewellery made with cat glass from Czechoslovakia, christening gowns (from the Edwardian and Victorian eras), vintage sewing kits, and old Victorian hats. “I probably have close to a dozen hats on the wall and some are children's ones as well that I found (some from the 1800s).”
“I am an old soul, there's no doubt about it,” said Edge, who worked in the printing industry, before taking to painting in her 40s.
Outside the house, she designed her garden in a way that would attract more bees and birds. Taking inspiration from the garden of her childhood home in New Zealand — filled with citrus, apricot, grape, and black, white and golden peach trees in the backyard, and flowers in the front — Edge planted 17 fragrant roses, summer lilacs, peonies, roses, camellias, sweet peas and honeysuckles; and built a greenhouse to grow tomatoes, peppers, lettuces, beets, radishes and more.
She spends a sizable time looking at the vegetation and flowers through a window in her kitchen — “just to see what's going on and what's changed.”
But to date, she has never seen a bird build a nest there.
“We've been dying to have a hummingbird nest in our garden because we have hummingbirds all year round.” But, no nests. “They're just so elusive.”
Edge compensated for a lack of nests in her garden with a growing many in her studio. The biggest body of work that Edge did this year was the nest paintings, she said.
“I love painting the eggs. They're just amazingly sensuous, the curvature of the egg… the feel of that translucency of an eggshell is like that of the petals on a flower when the light comes through,” she added.
“It's also symbolic of new life. It's like a gift of life that's coming our way when I have these eggs around.”
You can check out Edge’s nests at 320, 1000 Parker St., Vancouver, between Thursday, Nov. 17 to Sunday, Nov. 20, as part of Eastside Culture Crawl.
