Massive, overwhelming and rich with meaning, Reid's black bronze sculpture features a fantastic canoe-bound collection of half-human, half-animal figures from Haida spiritual beliefs.
The five tonne sculpture was installed at the Canadian embassy in Washington in 1991. It is so big that it had to be lifted by crane in order to be lowered down through a smokehole into a pool of water. The work is so impressive that a plaster cast of the sculpture is also prominently displayed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, and a replica was commissioned for Vancouver Airport's International Terminal.
The Canadian Masterpiece
The idea for The Spirit Of Haida Gwaii was born in 1985 when Vancouver architect Arthur Erickson asked Bill Reid to create a sculpture for the entry court of the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. Reid suggested a canoe full of travellers, an image which could serve as a symbolic bridge between cultures.
The crowded canoe holds thirteen passengers (not including stowaways). They appear in the shape of humans, bears, rodents, birds, a wolf and an amphibian, yet upon closer inspection, each character bears both human and animal likeness.
The Spirit of Haida Gwaii is Reid's largest and most complex work. The sculpture is made of cast bronze with black patina. Starting from the initial small clay sketch, it took five years to produce the 4900 kg (10,800 lb.), 6 m (19'10") long , 3.5 m (12'9") high final product. The work took place in Reid's Vancouver studio, and at a foundry in Beacon, New York. The sculpture went through a number of transformations including a plaster model, full-size prototype, complete plaster mold, and a hollow mold; all this before the months of welding, carving and recarving. Its surface was treated with commercial shoe polish to protect it from exposure.
Haida Gwaii: the place
The name Haida Gwaii, translated as The Islands of the People, is actually the short version of a Haida phrase which means The Islands at the Boundary of the World. This refers to an archipelago more commonly known to Canadians as the Queen Charlotte Islands. Captain George Dixon named the islands after his British merchant ship Queen Charlotte in 1787. But Haida people inhabited these islands long before Captain Dixon cruised by. Archaeological evidence and cultural memory suggest that the Haida first made these islands their home some 8,000 years ago.
Carving his niche
Born in Victoria B.C. on January 12, 1920, William Ronald Reid set out on an artistic life from very early on. He attended a private school run by Alice Carr, artist Emily Carr's sister. His grandfather's uncle, Charles Edenshaw, was known as the grandmaster of Haida argillite carving. Argillite is a sedimentary rock found in the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Son of a Haida mother and naturalized Canadian father, Reid worked for ten years as a CBC radio announcer before studying Haida carving techniques at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The Haida are known for many beautiful and distinctive artistic traditions, including the giant totem poles lining the fronts of their rectangular wooden houses. Reid was fascinated by the history, legends and artistic traditions he studied. Those studies changed his life, and Reid is now recognized around the world as one of the greatest carvers of the modern age.
Throughout his artistic career, Reid has experimented with a variety of media including jewellery-making, silk screening, carving canoes and totem poles, European art techniques and illustration, as well as sculpting with bronze and other materials. In all of his work, Reid draws upon his Haida heritage for inspiration, and it is widely felt that the power and grace of his work have done much to revive Northwest Coast Native arts that might otherwise have slipped into obscurity. French anthropologist Claude Levis-Strauss wrote that "our debt to Bill Reid, an incomparable artist, is that he has tended and revived a flame that was so close to dying."
Bill Reid has received honorary degrees from five Canadian universities. He has won several awards recognizing artistic excellence, and has been studied and praised by people from many disciplines.