Wabana says 'thank you' to expat Bell Islanders with mural made from repurposed materials
Bell Island artist Brian Burke had an idea: What if the Wabana Boys & Girls Club made a mural depicting mine workers, and they made it out of plastic bags?
"I think they were thinking I was half-cracked in the beginning," Burke told CBC's St. John's Morning Show on Tuesday. "One little fella said, 'But Brian, that's hard.' I said, 'Yeah, if it was easy, I'd get little babies to do it.' But I said, 'Ye can do it; you just don't know you can do it yet.'"
It's a recreation of a painting of two drillers in a Bell Island mine, chosen to represent the island's heritage, said Burke,a self-taught sculptor who has been immortalizing the island's heritage in works of art since the early '90s.
Burke, who was inspired to do the work when he came across a video online of someone doing something similar, compared the process to doing a patchwork quilt.
They learned that they can do things that they probably thought was way beyond them. - Brian Burke
"Instead of scraps of rag, we've got scraps of plastic bags," he said.
The bags were sorted by shade, Burke laid out the artwork like a paint-by-number diagram, and the kids selected sections to fill in, using stencils to cut out a piece of plastic. Then he used a flat-iron over the entire piece to stitch it together.
"If you keep the temperature low enough, you melt it together, you fuse it together, but you don't melt it to a liquid."
The piece is framed by wood with a connection to the mines too, explained Burke.
"They had what they call a pocket. The ore had been dumped over the cliff, and into a pocket, and then from the pocket it'd go into a series of conveyor buckets that would dump it into the ore boats," he said. "And part of the trestle that kept up the conveyor system, part of it was made out of wood, and this timber is from halfway up the cliff, left over from that trestle."
Generosity of expats
The mural will be going to Cambridge, Ont., as a gift to the Newfoundland Club, which boasts about "great entertainment from traditional Newfoundland music to local acts, tributes, and international recording artists."
There are expatriate Bell Islanders living in the area — many of whom left Newfoundland for factory jobs in southern Ontario after the Bell Island mine shut down — who have continued to support programs on Bell Island.
"They ended up there, and they brought their brothers and their nephews and their uncles and their whoever, their sisters, to Ontario and got jobs and that for them, and ever since then they've been giving back to the Wabana Boys & Girls Club and minor hockey and figure skating and everything else on Bell Island, and this is our way of saying thank you."
The mural accomplished several goals, said Burke: it commemorates Bell Island history, it makes an environmental statement through its repurposing of the plastic bags, and it has taught the kids of the Boys & Girls Club that they can accomplish things they didn't know they could do.
"They learned that they can do things that they probably thought was way beyond them when you break things down into steps," he said.
"One of the things I tried to impress upon them is that you can put one foot in front of the other — you do that often enough, you can walk around the world."
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