title : Maris Stella I
medium : watercolour, pencil & ink on paper
dimensions : 4 3/4? wide x 5 3/8? high

Maris Stella … star of the sea. I am navigating in a fog bank here but I will try not to get lost. Bear with me…

I have a small (about 13 1/2″ high) plaster statue of the virgin Mary in my office. I am not catholic but neither is it here in a cloud of irony. It was given to me by a woman I met last summer. She and I took a drive down the french shore of South Western Nova Scotia, stopping near a small community called Belliveau Cove. We were going to visit a tiny chapel to Maris Stella which sits near the shore of St. Mary’s Bay.

The wooden chapel is only large enough for two people to stand or kneel in.

Whether or not one is a christian of any sort, be you altogether irreligious even, it is a very good place to be, contemplating the meaning and brutality of exile.

Pierre Belliveau and a small number of fellow Acadians managed to escape their deportation ordered by the British in 1755. From a hidden place, in December of 1755 the fugitives watched ships leaving Annapolis Royal filled to the gunnels with more than 6,000 Acadians, violently dispossesed of their homes and in many cases, separated from their families. The deportation is one scar among many on the history of this region since europeans began coveting it.

Belliveau and his companions took the few open boats they had and headed for a safer place to hide out the winter. This led them to where the chapel now stands.

The winter was vicious and many did not survive it. Those that did owed many thanks for the compassion and generosity of local Mi’kmaq people who gave them assistance. Those who had lived through winter went north to New Brunswick. In 1768 Belliveau returned to that same cove, establishing the cradle settlement of returning Acadians whose descendants continue there today.

title : Maris Stella II
medium : watercolour, pencil & ink on paper
dimensions : 4 3/4? wide x 5 3/8? high

Symbolism is no small wonder for an artist. This image of Mary standing on the serpent, the gentle receptivity of her open hand, catch me by the heart. The persistent spirits of those outlawed people inspire me, pinned by fortune to the rocks, praying their way through a killing winter. Exile was precisely the state I was in when I took that drive to Mary’s chapel.

How remarkable that the very next day a small plaster version of Maris Stella found its way into my hands. It was purchased from a garage-seller who had no doubt acquired it in that same neck of the woods. Her left hand had broken off. The reseller had applied fresh plaster to the area, intending to carve her a new one, spray-paint her in weather-proof black and gold and present her as a lawn ornament. To each his own. I leave her standing as I found her.

I seek that I may find.