At the corner of Queen Street and Victoria stands a quintet of eight-foot-high iron sculptures bleeding rust. Nestled in the bustling metropolis of downtown Toronto since 2002, these sentinels have been a part of a myriad of Canadian landscapes from the Northwest Passage to the cliffs of Flatrock, Newfoundland, a 37,000 kilometre Canadian journey that left cracks and sores on the marked bodies of The Watchers.
Molded after the original wooden statues, The Watchers have immortalized the scars, scabs, and stories of their Canadian Iliad.
In 1997, Stride Gallery’s Diana Sherlock approached Peter von Tiesenhausen, a renowned artist with a nature-based aesthetic, to create a piece. Initially titled Forest Figures, the once-upon-a-time doodle was brought to life when the Albertan artist, with the help of a chainsaw, sculpted “the five guys” from homegrown spruce and pine.
In a christening ceremony documented by the CBC series Adrienne Clarkson Presents, von Tiesenhausen arranged the figures around a willow-woven basket and set it ablaze 25 kilometres outside of Calgary.
As both an environmentalist and artist in the small hamlet of Demmitt, von Tiesenhausen decided to install the sculptures on the roof of Calgary’s Louise Block Building as a reminder to oil companies that “there were other things going on” besides resource extraction.
Living in Northern Alberta for the past 45 years, von Tiesenhausen has used both words and art to articulate his views on the effect of oil and timber industries on the community. In 1997, he copyrighted his land as art so as to divert a planned pipeline away from his property.
After six weeks on display, von Tiesenhausen hoisted the figures onto his ’84 Ford pick-up and made sure that they would always stand erect in transport.
“Just on a lark, we actually stood them up in the back of the truck. They were ridiculously tall and … their effect on other people was across the board from double over laughter to horror, so I became very conscious all of a sudden of where I was,” he explains.
For the next several years, von Tiesenhausen toured across Canada with The Watchers as unsuspecting Canadians witnessed and added to the narrative of the piece.
“Every time it was getting more and more profound. You go through First Nations reservations and you go through religious communities and it became very evident that it had a completely different meaning depending on where you were. It became embedded in my mind that I [was] going to make a longer trip with these guys.”
It was a profound moment for von Tiesenhausen when on his journey he ran into a man from the Haida Gwaii region of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The man said to him, “You’re bringing your sculptures, your spirits to meet our spirits.”
In the Spring of 2001 at the behest of friend Richard Kroeker, von Tiesenhausen hesitantly visited Murdena Marshall, a Mi’Kmaq elder of the Eskasoni Reserve in Nova Scotia, to have his pieces named.
“They had been known as The Forest Figures … and I [didn’t] want them named. The convincing factor was when [Richard] said the price of gas on the reservation was way cheaper and I said, ‘okay, I’ll stop at the reserve.’”
Upon first sight, Marshall simply said, “Oh, The Watchers are here,” a name that ended up sticking.
By September 9, 2001, The Watchers had spent several months in Newfoundland as well as traveled to Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T, on the Henry Larsen, a coast guard icebreaker. Weathered down and beaten by sleet, snow and rain, the imprint of the bolts used to repair a missing leg can be seen on Queen Street.
By the spring of the next year, von Tiesenhausen had driven to Tuktoyaktuk and brought the sculptures home to Demmitt where he received a call from Karen Mills, a public art consultant who worked with the developers of The Maritime Life Tower in Toronto. As part of the City’s Percent for Public Art program, the developers were required to spend one per cent of the gross cost of the construction on public art pieces. The Watchers was chosen as the outdoor piece while the other two pieces, an anchor by Colette Whiten and Paul Kipps and a photo series by Barbara Steinman, were displayed inside.
“I think [art that is integrated into the architecture] is both wonderful and deplorable because sometimes it gets lost,” explains Steve Smart, a member of The Maritime Life Tower’s art selection jury. “First of all, [The Watchers] has a presence. Number two, it’s people, which is great because figurative art is not a big thing…so it brought into the corner the idea of a congregation, of people gathering in a place.”
Using melted iron from several Ford engine blocks, von Tiesenhausen created an exact mold of The Watchers and created a boat-shaped pedestal out of granite from the Canadian Shield.
Seven years later, The Watchers have slowly rusted away as a result of being untreated, a deliberate decision on the part of von Tiesenhausen.
“I want them to slowly escape down the drain. You can see the rust stains go all the way to the manhole. No matter how permanent something is, it’ll slowly escape. I think in our society, we’re so convinced that we’re permanent, [but] actually we’re just so transient.”
Von Tiesenhausen concludes by explaining how his initial wariness of bringing The Watchers into an urban centre changed after they passed through Tuktoyaktuk and the Northwest Passageway.
“I thought, ‘Holy shit, this is all about Canada.’ The journey was something I couldn’t have predicted and I couldn’t have forced it. It was very evident that the piece was a Canadian piece. It’s all about belonging to the psyche of Canada and that’s how it had to be,” he describes over a decade later.
“Every knothole and every bolt seen there has an epic Iliad behind the journey. It’s related to all kinds of stories in Canadian history.”
