A FOLK IN FOLKLAND

2024-2025

A Folk in Folkland is continuation of an earlier project (Folkland, 2023-2024), responding to a series of historical artworks by artists Stephen Parrish (American, 1846-1938) and Charles Platt (American, 1861-1933) that present the Maritimes as idealized landscapes or “Folk-ish” havens.

In Parrish and Platt’s landscape etchings of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (see exhibition “Stephen Parrish and Charles A. Platt: Nova Scotia and New Brunswick Views,” Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1985), human figures appear as generalized Maritime “Folk” - distant, simple, anonymous, and unspecified, engaging in traditional activities like trap or net mending.

For Folk of Folkland, I returned to some of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia sites depicted by Parrish and Platt. On these sites I enacted a re-creation of the historical works, inhabiting a ghost-like “Every-Folk” character who manipulates non-descript Folk objects in a series of poses in the middle ground. I wanted to create a strange/absurd/unsettling counter-Folk narrative, drawing attention to the anonymity and non-specificity that Maritime Folk often inhabit in historical artworks. Like other earlier projects in this series, I hope to question how our present-day notions of Maritime identity, about who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to behave, are tied up in nostalgia for a lost or imagined past.

This project was supported by the New Brunswick Arts Board (artsnb). 

Images:

Folk of Folkland, archival inkjet print, 20 x 30 in. each, 2024-2025. Documentation: Caleb Jones