Commerce Canoe
Bastion Square
Victoria, BC, 2008
The Commerce Canoe in downtown Victoria’s historic Bastion Square, symbolizes the canoe as the vessel of commerce which plied the local coastal waters pre European contact.
The sculpture is reminiscent of my canoe trips in Ontario’s Algonquin Park when the canoe made a scraping sound when it drifted in the reeds.
Traditionally, First Nations would harvest rice in waterways by tapping ripened kernels into the canoes, thus the red seed pods depict starch as a commodity.