The memory and legacy of A.O. Wheeler lives on as Susanne Swibold is the most recent artist to receive funding through the Wheeler Heritage House Foundation Grant.
With the grant, Swibold is working toward expanding her collection of unique images for future exhibitions and opening dialogue between disparate parties in regard to wildlife and the environment.
In applying for the grant, Swibold stated an expected outcome of receiving the grant would be an exhibition at Banff’s Whyte Museum and an exhibition crossing Canada.
Swibold’s striking images are created by photographing an element of wildlife; say a bear skull, “from an angle I like. Then I make a mirror image and rotate them around an axis until I find the spirit within.”
Swibold likens her technique of working with an image until she is content with the result to that of aboriginal mask carvers, who work to bring out an animal’s spirit in a piece.
Having worked in the North extensively, Swibold has ties with aboriginal people in northern Canada and Russia and has met with those in the Bow Valley.
“So many people of the north make masks,” she said. “They have a connection with wildlife and in the north, everything is about the spirit (inua). They honour the nature around them and understand spirit.”
After photographing a skull, bird wing or bone, for example, meditating and then manipulating images until the spirit of the animal appears to her, Swibold said at times, as the image is suddenly, correctly aligned, “I’m so spooked, I have to run out of the room.”
In her artist statement for the grant application, Swibold wrote, My imagery reflects vision: to recognize what exists behind the veil of appearances. To see a world apart from bodies and let you see another world your eyes could never find. Vision sees spirit in all creation; that which is limitless, changeless and eternal. There is the centre is. All that radiates outward, returns to the centre. Through what is revealed in my imagery, I am lead to experience a much larger and deeper content in my being than what is perceived by the senses.
As someone who is close to nature and identifies with wildlife, Swibold hopes here work will, “Stimulate conversation through the spirit of the animals. We might be able to start a serious conversation between native and non-native people in this area about preserving the animals.”
Swibold finds constant reports of wildlife being killed on area highways disturbing and would like to see the issue addressed.
“We need to sit down and discuss what we really want here. Do we want our wildlife around us?”
The Heritage House Foundation Grant was created to offset the 2011 demolition of Wheeler House, also known as Claremount House. Wheeler, a renowned surveyor and co-founder of the Alpine Club of Canada, built the Craftsmen-style house as a summer home on six acres of lease-land in 1923 a short distance from the road that leads to the Upper Hot Springs on Sulphur Mountain.
After the lease expired, Parks Canada chose to demolish the home as it sat inside the Middle Springs wildlife corridor, which is a restricted area and not open to the public.
In an effort to save the house and retain it as a legacy to Wheeler and his contribution to the Alpine Club of Canada, Wheeler’s great-granddaughter Jenny Crompton formed the A.O. Wheeler Heritage House Foundation.
Demolishing the 90-year-old house, designated a Recognized Federal Heritage Building in 1994, was one of the 1995 conditions of approval for the Middle Springs II housing development. The house, considered by Parks as an impediment to wildlife movement and a public safety hazard, had to be removed from the corridor.
Swibold’s is the second grant awarded, said Crompton. She, Donna Jo Massie and Janet Amy peruse grant application and choose the successful one.
“I now live in Vancouver, so I really depend on Donna Jo and Janet,” she said, “but we go through the applications and see what the interest is. We’re looking for diversity and interesting ideas. I’d like to see even more applications; I think it’s a matter of getting the word out there.
“We’ve had applications from Morley to Golden, B.C., all over the mountain corridor, which is nice because that reflects my great grandfather’s attachment to this area..”
