Bird buddies

Giant cardboard sculpture unveiled at Base31

Two birds sharing a tender moment will now offer a cheery welcome to visitors to Base31. Created by artists Laurence Vallières and Krista Dalby, the 2.3-metre tall cardboard sculpture is located adjacent to Melt Gallery and is part of the Aviators Garden of commissioned artworks. Vallières was approached by Christophe Doussot from Maison Depoivre Gallery after he saw her work on Instagram. She’s a ceramic artist and started to work with cardboard about a decade ago, and her art pieces have been installed in places around the world. For the piece at Base31, she was simply told it was going in the Aviators Garden and it had to have wings. She had a small ceramic sculpture of two birds and she decided it would be a perfect fit when translated to a giant cardboard sculpture. To expedite the project, Doussot introduced Vallières to the County’s resident cardboard artist, Krista Dalby. She is one of the founders of the Department of Illumination and has been working with cardboard for about 15 years. Knowing that a lot of cardboard would be required, Dalby asked members of the community to bring their clean Cardboard boxes up to Base 31, where she soon amassed a small mountain. “The call was a way to get the community invested. When they came to drop off their cardboard, they’re like, ‘Ooh, I’m being part of something.’ So it’s a strategy for community engagement,” said Dalby.

Starting with a simple wooden frame, Vallières and Dalby worked for two weeks, eight hours a day, to make the giant sculpture. The exterior is varnished, and Vallières said it will stand up to the weather. “It’s actually sturdier than you might think. It can take a fair amount of rain and it will dry and it’s fine.

They will keep a tarp to cover it when they expect rain, and in the winter it will be stored indoors. It will be revarnished in the spring and it will last for years,” she said. She named the piece Contentment. “I wanted to give these birds the feeling of enjoying the present moment. It’s not love; it’s the appreciation for one another.”

The art project is one facet of a process called creative placemaking at Base31, which CEO Tim Jones describes as being intentional in building the quality of a place. This concept has been around since the 1970s as part of the urbanist movement of the time, championed by people such as Jane Jacobs. “They were fed up with the professionalization of urban planning and how people in urban planning were working at cross-purposes with each other. What you ended up with was a cacophony of different things, and centuries of lessons learned about building quality of place were ignored. Look at European cities or old Ontario towns—there was an emphasis and respect for quality of place,” said Jones, who coined the term “creative placemaking” after working on revitalizing the Distillery District in Toronto around 2006. The County has actually been engaged in creative placemaking since about 2003 when then Economic Development Officer Dan Taylor attended a conference on urban development and started the creative rural economy strategy here, building the County brand with a “sense of place” including culture, the arts and food. “Really, creative placemaking has been at play in the County for 20-plus years, with people being intentional about it to leverage art and culture to create a new sense of place. It’s partly about the story of a place, partly about the look and feel of a place, and partly about the experience of a place,” said Jones.