From ashes to art: How one artist in C.B.N. is using charred memories to deal devastation
CBC
When Joanne Cole’s Western Bay art studio burned down in August, she lost 30 years of work.
She evacuated on the second day of the Kingston fire, which burned through Conception Bay North, taking with it over 200 structures.
Sketches and paintings from her early career, old books she used to bind journals, and a painting she’d been working on for three years, gone, along with her grandmother's rocking chair and her work tables.
Just a couple of feet away, her house overlooking the community stood strong. Now, a corner of her living room acts as her new studio, until she can rebuild in the new year.
“It was a bit surreal at first,” Cole told CBC News. “First, I had to deal with all the blackness that was around me, driving through and seeing everyone, you know, other people's houses just totally burned to the ground.”
Cole moved to Conception Bay North in 2022, and built her studio in 2024. The landscape — one of the main reasons she moved to Conception Bay North — is the subject of a lot of her paintings.
And post-fire, she’s still painting the view from her window, but it’s different now. Instead of a forest of full, vibrant colours, there are rocks and charred trees.
But, Cole is still finding creativity in the devastation.
“But then I thought, you know, I can still paint,” she said. The fire exposed rocks and geological details that were hidden under years and years of foliage and root systems. It gave Cole a whole new perspective on the landscape around her.
“The blackened trees and you know, the contrast between the ground and sometimes the sky, the way the light shines on the trees now is different… on a cloudy day or a drizzly day, it just looks so haunting and desolate,” she said.
“And that that kind of speaks to me, in a way of being solitary.”
And then, suddenly the landscape became the art itself.
“When I finished looking at the studio in ruins, I kind of looked around the landscape and amongst all the dark, the dark ground and the rocks, I seen these big orange mounds,” she said, pointing out her living room window.
“I realized that there were ant hills."
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