One Eye Folly
2008
interactive public sculpture (camera obscura), drawing, documentation
One Eye Folly was created for the W.K.P. Kennedy Art Gallery’s Ice Follies exhibition in 2008. Ice Follies is a biennale festival of contemporary and community-engaged art held on the frozen Lake Nipissing in North Bay, Ontario. The biennale encourages audiences to experience art outside the context of the gallery and to engage with the local landscape. The installations, performances and interventions shape a dialogue between art and site.
Curated by Dermot Wilson, the premise of Ice Follies is to create a work inspired by ice-fishing huts with reference to an architectural folly as a whimsical or extravagant structure built to serve as a conversation piece, not necessarily as a practical structure. With this in mind, One Eye Folly is a camera obscura that was constructed out of and on top of a small row boat to create a hybrid of a boat and a shed. The shed structure on top of the hull is a framework covered inside and out with salvaged stamped tin ceiling tiles, with a door salvaged from a former coal shed at Lawrence’s home. The structure contains a hatch at the bottom to allow for ice fishing. A small aperture, or opening, which allows light into the structure, casts an image inside of the view that is in front of the structure and turns it into a camera obscura.
In creating One Eye Folly Lawrence drew on the history of cameras obscura from the Victorian era (1937 to 1901) that took the form of small pavilions at seaside resorts. Visitors would enter these structures to see a view of the surrounding beach and town. For Ice Follies, the camera obscura’s view was across the frozen surface of Lake Nipissing, looking toward the city of North Bay and to the other artists’ works.
In keeping with the way in which Lawrence integrates his experience with the outdoors and his explorer persona throughout his practice, the night before the opening day, he camped out on the ice beside One Eye Folly. Lawrence sees camping as an experiential way of learning about a landscape or site ─ in this case, he experienced the continuous transmission of cracking ice sounds over distances on the frozen lake. The viewer, in turn, is invited to observe the landscape in a new way through the experience of the camera obscura.
Donald Lawrence, One Eye Folly, 2008. Installation view at the Kamloops Art Gallery, 2020. Photo: SITE Photography.
