Tracing a Caribou, Book Launch

If you follow me on Instagram @reubenmarkstewart you might have saw recent posts about a book launch. I wanted to share more about this project here. This book collaboration stemmed from a desire to explore other art practices outside of flora or outside of plants and flowers in the normal ways I explore and express with them. On October 23rd we launched our art book, Tracing a Caribou. This was a collaboration with artists Janice Wright Cheney and asinnajaq. The book was designed by Erin Goodine.

An "art book" is a term for when the book is the artwork itself. This isn't a catalog of an art exhibit or simply documentation of art work. The work was made for the book. Ours is an exploration and consideration of the missing caribou population from New Brunswick, Canada. Historically caribou lived in huge herds across the province until logging, disease and over hunting erased the population entirely by the end of the 1930's. At one point in the 1800s there were caribou hunting tourism ads circulating claiming excellent hunting grounds in what we conceive now as New Brunswick. They made great trophies for hunters because unlike other ungulates in the deer family Caribou are the only species where both the male and female adults grow antlers. Caribou have also been documented as being less shy and more curious creatures than their other counterparts like deer and moose. Making them easy targets for hunters. These caribou would have also been affected by the removal of the old growth forest and ecosystem that it supported, as logging practices removed this system almost entirely.

In 2021 I applied to a mentorship program through Connexion Arc, a New Brunswick based artist run association. It was through this three month mentorship where conversation about the caribou began with my mentor Janice Wright Cheney. Cheney's work often explores, animals, plants, fungi and lichen and during our beginning meetings we were trying to talk about subjects and shared interests where our work over-lapped. Both Janice and I are quite fond of lichen. I was curious to experiment with lichen as it is a material I have used before and I am interested to explore its potential in sculpture because of the fact that you can hydrate it and have it be soft and malleable and then once dry it becomes stiff and dormant, but its a process that can be repeated over and over. There is a particularly beautiful lichen that can be found occurring in New Brunswick which goes by the common name reindeer lichen or reindeer moss. It can cover wide swaths of the ground in whitish/grey mounding carpets. I always thought it was called reindeer lichen because it looked like snow and it was referencing arctic reindeer and had in my imagination a fairy tale-esque quality. It was while considering this lichen as a possible sculptural material that it occurred to me that lichen was the primary food source for caribou and it most likely got its common name while caribou were present and seen eating it. Having grown up in caribou free forests I had never made the association. So began the multi year project of researching, reading, writing and responding through our art practices about the caribou that used to roam my birthplace.

In Tracing a Caribou, you will find drawings, paintings, textile art, photography, poetry and prose. You will also find scanned letters from the NB Provincial archives of correspondence back and forth between a game warden and various people trying to ascertain if and where there are any caribou left in New Brunswick or any information about them at all. It is a beautiful book with vellum inserts, a fold out and a red stitched binding.

You can get your own copy mailed to you or mailed as a gift to a loved one directly through me. Simply send your request here: they are also available in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery gift shop or directly from my collaborators Janice Wright Cheney and asinnajaq. They are $60 CAD plus shipping. I am happy to mail them near and far. If you live in Montreal or Fredericton and want to pick one up in person that is also an option I'd be happy to arrange.

A big thank you to Connexion ARC and to New Brunswick Arts Board for funding and support of this project. Below are some photos of the book from the launch held at the Beaverbrook Art gallery in Fredericton, NB.