Prayer Flags for UBC Farm: Lois Klassen

(These flags are hung in the trees just east of the Maya in Exile Garden)

Small Creatures Pray by Lois Klassen


Biography:
Lois Klassen is a visual artist who is active in community-based art and collaborations. Comforter Art-Action is her ongoing community intervention in which artists, school groups, friends and family participate in making blankets for displaced people. In Archive City: Portraits of Lulu Island (Richmond Art Gallery, July 17- August 31, 2008), she has collaborated with artists Cindy Mochizuki and Jaimie Robson, to mount an archive of memories based on interviews with the people of Richmond. Her artworks, in textiles, book arts, performance and video installation, consider ecological and humanitarian issues. She has exhibited work at the Western Front and VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver; a subway station in Berlin; a costume parade at the Havana Biennial; and numerous other sites.


Artist Statement:
"Dear God, I don’t know how to pray by myself..." begins one of the first prayers in Carmen Bernos De Gasztold’s 1947 collection Prayers from the Ark. I don’t know how to pray for myself or for the UBC farm in the form of Tibetan Prayer Flags or in whatever form the Mayan’s in exile might pray for their portion of this land. Still, faced with this task to hang a set of fabric flags to raise awareness of the fragility of this place, I feel I want to let it speak on its own. I want to let the Little Bird, the Bee, the Owl, the Ladybird and the Butterfly describe their small interests in this place. For me, their small interests mimic my small interest in having a local organic market in summer; in watching a displaced community pass on ancient agrarian practices to their displaced families; in having children from my community learn to garden and to eat garden produce; in having adult students learn about sustainability by getting their hands dirty, like I did when I was young…. Like the Little Bird and Ladybird, our voices and interests are small but not so different.

(Texts - Carmen Bernos De Gasztold, Prayers from the Ark, The Creatures’ Choir, Translation– Rumer Godden, The Penguin Poets, 1979)

Copywright 2008, Lois Klassen