Statement

The graphite drawings of Bettina Harvey’s Drift series are renderings of the natural world, but they also operate as metaphors for her experiences with her father. After he was diagnosed with dementia, Harvey would accompany her father for walks along the beaches of Denman Island, where he carefully selected pieces of driftwood as gifts for his daughter. The delicacy of these pieces meant that Harvey had to carefully transport and preserve them before they fragmented or disintegrated. Much like her father’s mind, the driftwood seemed impermanent and fragile—the substance of a past about to disappear. The pieces had been part of something whole and, through travel from forest to sea to beach, were shaped by a lifetime of experience, the evidence of which was now only suggested by the hints of past attachments. 

After losing her father, Harvey continued to collect and document driftwood pieces in his memory, pursuing the parallels of aging within the natural and human worlds. For her subjects, she selects only branch attachments or tree collars, nodes of wood that express connection, attachment, and growth. The drawings in the Drift collection evoke the human anatomy—overlapping tissues that resist the process of decay. Each piece is centred on a white, unadorned background so that other media do not overshadow the driftwood’s strength. The focus on the wood insists on direct acknowledgment of the ideas of aging and degeneration, processes our culture frequently avoids. In this way, Drift offers an homage to age; it marks a refusal to allow the elderly or the process of aging to drift away into obscurity. Harvey’s driftwood drawings celebrate growing old; the pieces are like the gifts her father gave her at the end of his life.

Bettina Harvey would like to acknowledge that she is living and working on the traditional unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, specifically the scəw̓aθən Tsawwassen First Nations.