In this new monthly column, Ariel Marken Jack connects with a local artist and sits down for an in-depth conversation about their art practice. In this first edition, Ariel speaks with the multi-talented artist Jackie Stanley.
Ariel Marken Jack: You spent much of your life in other provinces and went back and forth between Ontario and Halifax before finding yourself at home in Lunenburg County in 2022. What is it about this stretch of Nova Scotia that drew you in and holds you here?
Jackie Stanley: I was born in Alberta, so my earliest memories are of the street I lived on in Calgary, and of snow-capped mountains and chinooks. My parents were living in B.C. right before I was born and ended up bringing me back to Toronto, where my mom grew up, when I was five. I spent decades of my life in Southern Ontario, but I never truly felt connected to the land there. My dad and his siblings were born in Dartmouth and I always wanted to visit Nova Scotia, so when the opportunity came to play a few shows out here with my band in 2008, I felt a sense of homecoming. Warranted or not, that feeling has never gone away. I have a partner in all of this, Ryan, who felt the same ancestral pull to stay out here where he also has generational roots. We moved to the tiny village of West Pennant almost 15 years ago and had some of the most transformative experiences of our adult lives there, writing an album, swimming in a secluded lake and walking the wilderness and looking out over the cove.
We moved back to Ontario for complicated reasons, and I am so thankful that we did because the friendships we built and strengthened and the musical partnerships we made and the projects we completed there are phenomenal. We made our most polished, intricate album to date, launched our first crowd-funded project and took fan commissions for cover songs that led me down the path of learning to edit music videos. I made an entire feature-length movie, and went on my biggest tour ever; that kept me living on the road for many months. Those things could not have happened had we stayed here. I always knew we’d come back to Nova Scotia though. We shot a video for our song “Death Rattle Blues” on someone’s abandoned junkyard near Chester and we drove into Lunenburg occasionally to check it out, but we had no idea how gorgeous and welcoming and truly in sync with us the South Shore is. Ryan’s parents moved to the Petite Rivière area almost six years ago, so they were our “in”. They showed us around. We got to experience the land and the LaHave, and it all just felt perfectly comfortable for us as creative, nature-loving weirdos. Comfort — feeling safe — is crucial to happiness, and a key component to our lives now as we raise our son. I am here as much for him as I am for myself.
AMJ: I’m curious about your artistic relationship with place. Do your immediate surroundings — scenery, community, physical home spaces — have a notable impact on how you relate to inspiration or other facets of your practice as an artist?
JS: Location has a huge bearing on the work I produce. My earliest creative outputs were poems and songs I wrote and recorded in secret in my childhood bedroom with pen and paper or a tape recorder. Those poems and songs were so plaintive and gentle, yet meticulous and determined, much like my tidy and insular adolescent bedroom spaces were. I learned to play guitar as a teenager and spent countless hours playing as quietly as possible in my bedroom. When I started learning to play drums and simultaneously co-writing songs with my partner in a basement apartment, I experienced that same tentativeness at first. It wasn’t until I entered my first recording situation — we rented a cottage and recorded an album in a few days — that I began to occupy more space with my drumming and my voice. I got louder and more ambitious. I wrote more adamant lyrics and hit harder because the sound of what I was doing had more places to travel. That first recording situation in 2007 was notable because the cottage we rented was up in Tobermory, a place where I had camped in my childhood. Tobermory is located at the tip of a peninsula, and at an early point during our recording session, we went out on the rooftop and all we could see were the tips of trees in every direction. It was 360 degrees of forest, with the only sound being waves coming from Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Water surrounded that spot, and any place with lots of water and wilderness is where I’m going to create my most expansive work.
CRONE, the most recent album by our band, Cursed Arrows, was created in our living room in a small town — the nexus of the wilderness up in cottage country. We were connected by a thin wall to my brother’s apartment, and our other neighbours were metres away, so there was a degree of self-consciousness when we recorded – that makes the record more meticulous and restrained and not at all unhinged. The songs themselves might reflect the vastness of our geographical area — that oneness with nature is always a strong theme in my art — but in its execution, the album was built under mild duress. That tension is good; some form of it permeates all of my work and I am thankful for it. We were always hurrying and taking turns to get things recorded before our son needed more hands-on attention, or before the neighbours might be bothered, whereas, the numerous recordings I’ve made in empty jam spaces or unfinished basements in the middle of the night possess this defiant, chaotic energy that I can’t seem to harness when I’m in a more “civilized” environment. I think that’s partly why I began to dive deeply into video production in the mid-2010s, and to write more, and to make upcycled jewellery in our one-room apartment: the simple fact that my neighbours could hear every little thing I did made me unwilling to submit to my most bombastic creative urges.
AMJ: Have you found that your artistic practice has changed significantly since moving here — and, if so, in what ways?
JS: We moved to the South Shore two and a half years ago, and we’ve unwillingly moved two more times since then. So, if anything, being in constant flux has changed how I make art and what I do. I find I am moving faster; I’m initiating more projects and shows and asking people to collaborate more often. I have focussed much more intently on producing physical art that I can bring to markets and earn a small living by. I’ve been in near-constant survival mode, so my songwriting has slowed dramatically — say, down to a couple of songs a year versus a dozen. As I think about my home now, though and remember that I am able to gaze out across the river and take daily walks in the forest again, just like I did in West Pennant 12 years ago, I feel a sense of liberation. I am simultaneously at peace and fired up! When we had our first band practice here and I sat behind my drums staring out at water and a tiny island, I felt more excited to be a musician than I have in years.
AMJ: You’re a multidisciplinary artist — among other things, you are a writer, a musician, and a maker of hand-stitched jewelry and hand-dyed upcycled clothing. Do you feel there is significant connection or interplay between the works you create in various media?
JS: My daily routine involves a lot more balance than it ever has before between music, writing, and designing fashionable art stuff. Honestly, I am determined to connect each one of these disciplines to the others whether they want to be or not. I started making jewellery and naming each piece after a song by an artist I love and I tend to paint lyrics and imagery from books and songs onto the leather and canvas pieces I work with. I love the improvisational nature of dyeing fabric, and in particular, letting nature take its course with a rust-dyed piece, for example, before I rescue it. I’ve made an entire album of improvised songs and working with fibres feels somewhat akin to working with sound. I do have a hard time connecting to textile art emotionally, though. It’s as if my songs and videos are my emotional core, my writings reveal more of my intellectual self, and my wearable artwork, although created mindfully, is all but detached from my personal feelings. Those pieces are more like physical extensions of myself. I started cutting up clothes and making goth jewellery to trade on the online bartering platform BUNZ in Toronto more than eight years ago in exchange for household items and toys for my baby. It’s always been an exercise in pragmatism versus the idealistic, lofty intentions I harbour when I make music. Both activities tackle capitalism from different angles.
AMJ: Your artistic output comes from both your solo practice and shared projects with your partner, Ryan, with whom you’ve made an oracle deck and a great deal of music. I’m curious about how you engage with your creative vision and inspiration both on your own and when you’re working with Ryan, and how that engagement might be similar or different in each scenario.
JS: I wrote the prose aspect of the oracle deck and guidebook for which he created the artwork. We began that project before we had decided to move here, so it’s a unique work that straddles our time in two different provinces. The guidebook reflects my level of attunement shortly after having made a big life change; I think I was very spiritually “open” almost to a disassociated degree. I have no memory of writing it, which is rare; I can generally visualize exactly where and when I wrote a piece no matter how long ago it was. Ryan pushed me to complete the oracle project when I wasn’t wholly convinced I was ready. I do this for him as well. I’m usually the instigator when it comes to our music: I often tell him it’s time to start, or to finish, a project. Oftentimes, I will have the idea, and he will just do the work of creating, or letting his hands do the talking by playing guitar. The oracle deck was actually my idea, but then it was Ryan who made sure that we followed through and launched and executed the whole project when we did.
When I’m on my own, I work very intuitively. I don’t follow a schedule or even a discernible workflow; sometimes it’s pure chaos. Scraps of fabric and thread thrown around a room, disjointed lines in a notebook, erratic voice memos on my phone. I’m pretty adept at writing prose for long stretches when I’m alone and writing complete songs, but with music, I prefer to be a performer and a collaborator. I come up with much more transcendent, satisfying stuff when I work with Ryan. His creative strengths coupled with my own make me feel like anything is possible.
AMJ: As a full time working artist, are there things you do in other parts of your life to support and sustain your creative energy and stave off burnout?
JS: Walking in the woods in the mornings is my most grounding practice, followed by an ever-evolving self-taught movement practice. My tattered Hatha yoga manual that I found in a thrift store 12 years ago and my Ayurvedic cookbook are very centering when things go sideways. My days flow best with a good deal of cardio involved; playing drums with no goal and no particular song in mind is also rejuvenating. Getting enough sleep is something I am finally good at doing. I have really had to work at this through trial and error, and through many volatile situations — working night shifts, then playing shows and driving well into the wee hours of the morning, and finding my most fertile creative periods in the dead of night, then becoming a parent and being chronically ill for six years all kept me from getting a normal night of sleep for a very long time. I love reading, mostly nonfiction related to nature and folklore, short story anthologies and personal essays. Listening to interviews with my favourite musicians is hugely encouraging. I consume media carefully, but I adore so much TV and film that many of my favourite lyrics were directly inspired by a line or a character arc in a show I loved. Six Feet Under long ago inspired one of my earliest lyrics; more recently I wrote an entire song, half in French, after watching the French-Canadian series Can You Hear Me?
AMJ: Do you have any current or planned projects that you’re excited to talk about?
JS: I’m always activated by the quietest of times. Winter is one of those times, especially right after the winter solstice and at the start of the New Year. I plan to place all of my creative energy into writing new songs for Cursed Arrows, which I have not done since 2020. I’m so excited to hear what I have rattling around in me, waiting to escape! We’re working on some live performances and recordings of big, ambitious cover songs with friends both here and in Ontario – that will come to fruition in February.
AMJ: Are there upcoming local shows, art markets, or other opportunities for Barnacle readers to check out any of your work in person?
JS: Cursed Arrows will be performing at the Lunenburg Legion on February 15th, and at the Old Confidence Lodge’s Big Shiny 2 Concert in Riverport on February 22nd. These will actually be our first ever shows on the South Shore!
AMJ: And finally, outside of specific events, where can our readers look to find your music, writing, and other works of art and artisanship, whether locally or online?
JS: I maintain a spiffy website, CursedArrows.com, which I would love for everyone to check out. I also publish a Substack, JackieStanley.Substack.com, which harbours many personal essays, works of fiction and poetry. Cursed Arrows on Youtube is also fun. Locally, Whimsy and Wildthings at 214 Lincoln Street in Lunenburg is a fanciful little shop that carries lots of artwork by local artists, including my oracle deck and jewellery.
