Brackish Waters

RACKISH WATERS is the third of three projects to engage the resource industries of Vancouver Island (mining, forestry, and fishing) through contemporary art and writing.

Brackish waters mingle the fresh with the salt. Departing from industrial ports and shoreline ecosystems, this publication crosses oceanic worlds of extraction and distribution. It responds to marine environments diffracted by the perspectives of artists, writers, Indigenous Elders, fish and fishers, biologists, citizen scientists, whales, physicists, boat builders, ship workers, sailors, pirates, brittle stars, and other creatures of the deep.

Nanaimo Art Gallery is located on Snuneymuxw territory, one block from the city’s harbor, a place that has seen the forced displacement of Snuneymuxw villages, the arrival of precarious mine workers from China, the UK, and Scandinavia, and the World War II internment of Japanese Canadians who ran herring salteries and shipyards there.

Such harbors have also been places of exchange, where shipping news and seafarers’ stories were shared. BRACKISH WATERS is a similar waystation. Expanding from two exhibitions, Landfall and Departure: Prologue and Epilogue, it records globally interconnected aquatic lives and histories, while considering submerged narratives and forms of cultural expression.