Master carver re-imagines totem artistry with more sustainable approach

Master carver Carey Newman is taking a more modern approach to the traditional art of carving.

A master carver on Vancouver Island is combining traditional art with modern engineering for a more sustainable approach to totems that’ve been commissioned for the commercial market or non-cultural purposes.

“This is the very first one,” says Indigenous artist Carey Newman (Hayalthkin’geme).

He’s chiselling away in his Tsawout workshop on a project that’s unlike the old growth totems laying next to the modern masterpiece. The untrained eye can spot the difference: The work dubbed ‘Totem 2.0’ is bolted to a large, metal apparatus and is made up of 14 beams rather than a single log.

“When it comes to the process of carving, there were no challenges. Old growth is the best,” says Newman.

“But the challenge comes with acquiring it. It comes with thinking about how few there are left and how in peril our old growth ecosystems are and meeting the responsibility to future generations to make sure that we have old growth for them.”

The reflections have led him to the modernized approach, which uses second-growth cedar, and enlisted the help of engineering students at Camosun College.

“Seeing the way they thought through my process and then turned it into this was pretty awesome,” says Newman.

A team of six core students from the mechanical engineering department, plus another six at other smaller stages, developed an innovative machine that tapers logs. It also has a rotation mechanism so carvers can position and access the timber from any angle.

“It had to be secured enough so that nobody was going to get hurt. It had to be flexible enough so that Carey could do the carving he wanted to do. And so at every stage we were looking at not just the engineering questions, but also the best esthetic questions,” says Camosun innovates education division director, Richard Gale.

The college secured a two-year, roughly $200-thousand grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council College and Community Social Innovation fund to do the work.

“It’s one of the best things, I think, that we’ve ever done,” says Gale.

The device can also be disassembled to fit in a truck and taken to other communities and accessed by other artists.

Newman says the response is only starting now as word on the project gets out – and he recalls a heartwarming moment showcasing the apparatus to his father, master carver Victor Newman (Hemasaka).

“If you’ve carved poles before, you would know that just shifting it like a couple of degrees is a big process until now,” says Newman. “And he chuckled, like just chortled almost. For me that was pretty special because he’s the person that taught me.”

New challenges, learning curve

In the transition to the modernized approach, Newman and his journeyman carver have encountered new challenges.

“There’s a lot of things you have to concede in just the entire process,” says Tejas Collison.

When carvers design totems on old growth trees, the logs naturally shrink and expand as one. But with 14 beams, Newman says, the math needs to be precise as each strand of wood shrinks and expands independently.

“I think the ‘aha’ moment for this was when I decided that rather than gluing them together, we would make it so that [the beams] were just a little bit separate,” says Newman. “They’re held together in a form.”

“I think also from an esthetic perspective, it makes it look different. And that’s important when you’re making work that’s about an issue, an issue created by policy, an issue created by industry. It’s a different way of doing things,” he adds.

Newman says there are also more challenges working with second-growth wood due to wider grains and more knots.

“It’s going to be my eighth totem working with Carey,” says Collison. “The previous ones were all old growth. And so this is the reinvention of that process which has been really fun to be part of, because it’s a lot of problem solving. A lot of coming up with new ideas to approach this old paradigm which is really interesting,” he says.

The totem the duo is working on now will have four orcas on it.

Newman says he thought it was fitting for its future home Pacific Opera Victoria, because of the whale’s “beautiful” song.