Brackish Waters

Brackish Waters is the third title of three projects to engage the resource industries of Vancouver Island (mining, forestry, and fishing) through contemporary art and writing. Departing from industrial ports and shoreline ecosystems, the book 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 one block from the city’s harbour, 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 harbours 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.