An ideal place for a sculpture symposium, the Îles-de-la-Madeleine are themselves true natural sculptures. Stretching nearly sixty-five kilometres and made up of six islands connected by narrow sand dunes, the archipelago has more shipwrecks than ships; it is inhabited by fifteen thousand people endowed with extreme resourcefulness.
The third edition of the Mer Océanie Symposium, On the Sea as in the Sky, coordinated by Martine Martin and funded by the Loto-Québec Art Collection, generated a wide variety of artistic responses across a broad range of techniques. Some artists came from the islands, others from the Maritimes, and others from Montreal, Saint-Hilaire, and Quebec City. Many, seasoned by previous symposiums in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, returned simply for the beauty of the place. Most of the works were installed in Havre-Aubert, a warm and picturesque village whose inhabitants, in the 19th century, welcomed fishing boats in large numbers and then prepared and dried cod and eels on long outdoor tables. Hay is still stacked in the fields, protected under metal roofs like houses…
TRIBUTE TO THE MADELINOTS
The star of the symposium was undoubtedly Armand Vaillancourt. He had the idea of creating a permanent sculptural monument titled The Heart of the Islands on an old shipbuilding slipway clearly visible from Havre-Aubert. Investing himself in this project with his usual sense of scale and historical context, Vaillancourt lifted the ten-metre bridge of the Dona May, a trawler abandoned nearly ten years earlier, and placed it vertically on a platform once used to haul boats out of the sea. Secured with steel cables and adorned at its centre with a steel heart covered in bright red enamel, The Heart of the Islands pays tribute to the Madelinots’ struggle for survival over the centuries; the work also recalls Vaillancourt’s own experience, as in his youth he worked aboard ships that sailed the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.