Shipwreck
Shipwreck, 2024, Acrylic on Canvas, 70″ x 144″.
This is my most recent work called “Shipwreck” (2024) which honours my relationship to water but, also the connection of water to grieving and its ability to cleanse through tears. Our salty tears remind us that we are connected to the ocean in profound ways given the water in the body has the same mineral composition as the sea. Tears also hold our emotions. In science, we call them hormones. When we consider that we are made up of 70% – 85% water and so much of who we are is connected to our emotions, it highlights how we are the water. I was grieving the past two years and resonated with the image of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s “The Crew of the HMS Terror, Saving the Boats on the Night of 15th March” painting by George Chambers of 1837. The ship got stuck in the ice of the Hudson Bay during one of the Franklin expeditions. The original shows the ship surrounded by people but, my HMS Terror ship is abandoned in the ice and rotting while a narwhal looks out for accountability. I see the HMS Terror and Narwhal as a self-portrait. Surrounding them are unicorns. This is a reference to the novel “The Last Unicorn” by Peter Beagle which is an allegory for capitalism with greedy King Haggard trapping all the unicorns into the sea because they are the only thing that “makes him happy.” This left the last unicorn, now an endangered species, to search for those like her. Working with water in this way assisted me in transmuting my pain and informed the way I work with others in wellness practices. The piece then moves from self-healing to embodying seeds of environmental activism.
Artist Statement: Menagoesg (Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada) based painter Deanna Musgrave is best known for her monumental paintings and ability to move from representational surrealism to complete abstraction. Her large installation, “Transcendence” (2022), filled a 20’ by 37’ wall and served as a feminist counterpoint to Salvador Dali’s “Santiago El Grande” during opening celebrations for the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s (BAG) Harrison McCain Pavilion. Her recent work “Shipwreck” (2024) continues conversations from her earlier large works acquired by permanent institutional settings, including Diversity (2021), Mirror (2019), “Cloud” (2015) and “Tropos” (2011). She graduated from the Mount Allison University Fine Arts program in 2005 and was soon after selected by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery for the 2007 Studio Watch Award. She has also won numerous grants from the New Brunswick Arts Board and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2019 she completed her Master of Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of New Brunswick (Psychology and Fine Art) where she delivered her thesis titled “Connecting Crossmodal Interactions in Visual Music to Create ‘Mindful’ Experiences.” To honour her research in visual music, she often has debuts of compositions by Canadian musician, Andrew Reed Miller, at her art openings. Supporting a healthy arts community, water and wellness is important to Musgrave which is why she completed the Orca Institute’s Counselling Skills Program in 2024. Along with her supervisor, Danielle Hogan, she supports fellow artists through her part-time position with CollectionARTNB where she gets to curate and promote New Brunswick art in the public schools. Along with the Director of the Sunbury Shores Art and Nature Centre, Caroline Walker, she organized a hybrid artist talk called “Peace in Water Through Boundaries” with Eastern Charlotte Waterway’s Ocean Scientist, Kalen Mawer, and the Canadian Conservation Council’s and Fundy Baykeeper, Matt Abbott, that took place in June 2024 to discuss environmental concerns around water. This fall she will be speaking about art and wellness as a presenter for the 2024 Arts Atlantic Symposium.
