As he sat on a 30-foot pile of dirt staring into the fire last January, artist Paul Griffin watched the flames consume his studio, the pieces he’d worked on and ones that would never be made.
“It just kind of set in,” he said. “It’s about the loss of potentiality. It’s like wondering what your children will look like when they grow up, that kind of excitement about the growth of something. You know when you have quality stuff to work with.”
Griffin lost roughly $35,000 worth of artwork and materials, but made up his mind he would try to salvage what he could of an exhibition originally planned for last spring.
What may have seemed like the end of Griffin’s work became the starting point for a new exhibit. In the wake of destruction, something rose from the ashes.
His exhibition is now called What I Found in the Flames and runs at the UNB Arts Centre until Nov. 29.
At 31, Griffin attended graMount Allison University in Sackville. After doing graduate work at the University of Guelph, he and his family settled in Sackville where he’s an assistant technician in sculpture at Mount A.
His art has been exhibited across the country since 1991.
His studio was located in the Enterprise Foundry in Sackville, New Brunswick. Griffin was working when he got the call saying the Foundry building was on fire.
When he got to the studio the next day, his art was gone but his artistic sensibility was intact.
“I went the next day to look at the destruction and the same [artistic] reflex kicked in with these beams,” he said.
“You had the alligator scalloping on [the beams] in the sun. They hadn’t been moved around. It was jewel like.”
These wooden beams were smoothed then lacquered to give a luscious, glossy finish and are displayed row by row in his exhibit. He calls it “Fire Bones.”
Griffin always had an interest in wood. He used to build log houses and work in lumber mills, but that wasn’t enough for him.
“I always had a penchant for creating artistic things,” he said. “I had a hunger for knowledge.”
His first official piece of art was a sheet of scrap metal he burned a self-portrait into.
“Because it was painted on one side it produced this two sided doubled portrait,” he said. “Kind of a Dorian Gray where one side looked fresh and the other looked evil almost, but it was the colours and the change in the fire.”
He decided it would look best suspended from the ceiling. It was a second year project at Mount Allison University. It went on to be displayed in a show at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Downtown Fredericton.
His new exhibit displays a piece of scrap metal he found in the wreckage of the fire that is twisted, hangs from the ceiling and is painted red on one side.
“It’s kind of full circle,” he said. “I’m really quite happy with the turn that these took,” he said. “Not just happy that I dug myself out of a hole creatively.”
The exhibition runs at the UNB Arts Centre until Nov. 29. Griffin gives an artist’s talk at the centre Nov. 21 at 7 pm.
