Greenland-inspired glacier sculpture adorns museum’s Arctic exhibit

Workers install a steel sculpture by artist, Bill Lishman, at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa this past October. The sculpture will serve as a centre-piece for an Arctic tundra landscape display, one of three geographic zones to be featured in a “Landscapes of Canada” garden outside the museum. Lishman’s work is influenced by his visits to Canada’s Arctic and will be surrounded by a faux-Arctic tundra complete with indigenous plants from the region, such as crowberry and russet sedge. (PHOTO COURTESY OF BILL LISHMAN)

This artist’s rendition shows a view of the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Landscapes of Canada Garden, with Bill Lishman’s glacier sculpture in the middle distance. (IMAGE COURTESY OF CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE)

Bill Lishman looked across Disco Bay toward the west coast of Greenland from the deck of a ship in 2004.

What the artist saw next would influence a project he didn’t think about for another six years and didn’t complete until 2015: a sculpture for a new Arctic exhibit in Ottawa on the grounds of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

As Lishman watched from the ship’s deck, a massive block of ice split from its larger mass with a deafening crack and collapsed into the ocean.

The colossal fragment threatened to disappear under the surface, but as its buoyancy returned, the iceberg sliced through the surface in a froth of white water and towered over the valleys and hills of the icy sea’s swelling waves.

He recorded this video of the scene:

And the event inspired Lishman’s iceberg sculpture, which anchors the Arctic zone at the new Landscapes of Canada Garden at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

“I happened to be at the right place at the right time… The thing that was amazing me first of all was their size, so you cannot do a berg sculpture without making it of awesome size,” said the veteran sculptor, who ia also a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society.

The 13-metre steel sculpture was installed last month on the grounds of the museum, where the area surrounding Lishman’s work is being landscaped to resemble Canada’s Arctic tundra.

Plants indigenous to the region, such as crowberry and russet sedge, are being planted in this faux-tundra, one of three zones commissioned by the museum to showcase Canada’s diverse geography.

The other zones will mimic the prairie grasslands of the West and the boreal forest of the Canadian Shield.

“I was inspired by Lawren Harris and also early illustrations of icebergs in books about the early explorers,” Lishman said.

“I was raised on the art of Canada’s Group of Seven and on my first trip to the Arctic I was amazed at how just about everywhere I looked it was so reminiscent of Lawren Harris’s paintings.”

For decades, Lishman has made his career producing sculptures, many of which are found in permanent exhibits.

If his name sound familiar, however, it might be from his “Father Goose” exploits in the 1990s, when he used his ultra-light aircraft to lead a pack of geese from Ontario to Virginia — a project dubbed “Operation Migration.”

The project was the inspiration for the 1996 Oscar-nominated movie Fly Away Home.

Lishman’s relationship with Canada’s Arctic began with a visit to Iqaluit in 1988.

“…But every year since 2002 I have been traveling as a staff member of either Adventure Canada or Students on Ice in their summer trips throughout the Arctic,” Lishman said.

Construction on the Landscapes of Canada Gardens will continue until this winter. The museum expects to complete the project and open it to the public in 2016.