Original Wood Assemblage - 'Tattered Treaty'

Laird Campbell is a Vancouver Island–based artist whose work emerges from a deep engagement with the materials and histories of coastal British Columbia. Building abstract compositions from reclaimed and found wood, he works intuitively — piecing, fitting, and assembling until the work finds its own logic. His practice is rooted in a conviction that art can hold both the visible and the invisible: the retinal and the cerebral, the personal and the collective, the made and the found.

A treaty is a document of agreement — and of rupture. 'Tattered Treaty' takes its title from the condition of so many agreements made between Indigenous peoples and colonial governments on this coast: frayed at the edges, worn by time, honoured imperfectly if at all. The work does not illustrate this history so much as it holds it — in the weathered surfaces of the wood, in the way the pieces fit together and also don’t quite fit, in the tension between order and unravelling that runs through the whole composition. It is a work that asks something of the viewer, and does not let go easily.

This original work is a Wood Assemblage: a hand-built composition of reclaimed wood pieces, displayed with a thin wood frame that allows both the front and the back of the artwork to be seen — the reverse as much a part of the work as the face.

Medium: Original Wood Assemblage (reclaimed and found wood)
Dimensions: 68 × 36 cm (27 × 14.25")
Framing: Thin wood frame; front and reverse both displayed
Authenticity: One-of-a-kind original; signed by the artist

Exhibited: Federation of Canadian Artists Gallery - 2022 Abstracted Exhibition