Arts&Ent Entertainment Motherstone: British Columbia's Volcanic Plateau
Motherstone: British Columbia's Volcanic Plateau
By Sage Birchwater
Motherstone: British Columbia's Volcanic Plateau - By Chris Harris and Harold Rhenisch
Award-winning photographer, Chris Harris, and acclaimed writer, Harold Rhenisch, have teamed up to produce yet another stunning coffee table book portraying the majesty and poetry of the Cariboo Chilcotin. The long awaited will be launched October16 at a gala reception starting at 7:30 p.m. at Exeter Lodge in 100 Mile House.
This will kick off an extensive province-wide tour and slide show promoting the new book with stops in Williams Lake on October 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the Williams Lake Secondary School commons, and October 21 at the school in Anahim Lake, starting at 7:30pm.
(Image: Cover of the coffee table book Motherstone: British Columbia’s Volcanic Plateau by Chris Harris and Harold Rhenisch)
Two years ago Harris and Rhenisch set the bar high when their first collaboration, Spirit in the Grass: The , was nominated for two BC Book Prizes categories. Harris says the quality of Motherstone surpasses that effort.
Both Harris and Rhenisch have the gift to inspire. They are each adept at pulling back the veil of every day perception to reveal the essence of what makes our region unique.
Over the past twenty years, Harris has gone to great lengths to record profound images of the Cariboo Chilcotin landscape. He causes you to take a second or maybe a third look at the scenes you might pass by every day, and view them differently. That’s the gift of the artist. He also takes you to rare places few people get a chance to visit.
(Photo: Chris Harris)
Rhenisch with his pen, takes you on a poetic journey. Even when he’s writing prose. His creative genius helps you see with different eyes.
In Motherstone, both the writer and photographer invite you to join them on an expedition into time; to peak into the beginning, and wonder how the landform we call British Columbia, and specifically the Cariboo Chilcotin, was formed.
Rhenisch uses the scientific expertise of university professor Dr. Mary Lou Bevier to augment his gut-felt romantic impression of the region that embraces the mythological thinking of telling the story of being in a place.
“It’s an interesting balance, the scientific and mythological,” Rhenisch says. “We had to have the science right, but at the same time it’s not a scientific book. We had to tell the story of being there. Science couldn’t do that.”
As with most Chris Harris projects, Motherstone began with the germ of an idea years earlier that took on a life of its own. When Harris was on horseback in the 1990s, photographing in the Ilgatchuz Mountains with outfitters, Roger and Wanda Williams, he and fellow photographer, Kris Andrews, decided to take a side hike over a ridge to see what was on the other side. Harris came back with the image of a crater lake nestled in an undisturbed volcanic cone. This became the seed for the Motherstone project.
“I vowed to go back there,” he says. “It was the heart of the Ilgatchuz volcano. How many people go through there in a year? It was a masterpiece of nature. I virtually don’t think anyone has ever been there.”
When he began the actual work of photographing for Motherstone, Harris wasn’t sure what the project was going to look like.
“All my books are total exploration,” he says. “I’ve learned to trust the process. Doors start to open. I just like being out there hiking, physical and free, exploring with the camera.”
Harris decided he wanted to walk the ground he intended to photograph rather than travel by horseback. He hired guide outfitters Dave and Joyce Dorsey, and Roger and Wanda Williams to pack his camp gear and equipment two days into the wilderness of the three West Chilcotin shield volcanoes, the Rainbows, the Ilgatchuz and the Itcha mountain ranges, while he and his wife, Rita Giesbrecht, and friend, Mike Duffy, went by foot.
“I’m a mountain person,” Harris explains. “Mountains turn me on. I’ve ridden through these mountain ranges before, but this time I walked through every inch of it. When you walk you feel like you’re touching the earth. You feel the energy coming up through the earth. Responding to that, creates imagery that really speaks to you.”
For Harris, encountering this undisturbed landscape and capturing the images was deeply emotional.
“I found I was in tears out there. The volcanic landscape is so untouched; so powerful.”
Hiking from their wilderness base camp, Harris returned to the crater lake that inspired the project years earlier, and noted only slight changes to the landscape caused by gravity and erosion over a fifteen-year span.
“Everything is moving,” Harris says. “I call them galleries. Freezing and thawing, rivers of rock moving towards the ocean. It’s as if the gallery is being hung every day. These masterpieces of totally undisturbed, patterned ground sorted by weight and colour, are six or seven million years in the making.”
He says the grand architect, Mother Nature, is still working on it.
“That’s a pretty powerful thought. I call this the truth. To me that’s the ultimate truth, unadulterated, all this patterned ground. Once you’re aware of it, it’s everywhere. I see it everywhere now.”
Motherstone covers a vast region of volcanic activity from the edge of the Chilcotin Plateau where it buttresses up against the Coast Mountains in the west, to the North Thompson River basaltic columns in the east. Over a two year period Harris photographed hundreds of magnificent images across the region, then he handed the project over to Rhenisch.
(Photo: Harold Rhenisch)
It was Rhenisch who came up with the term “motherstone” used for the title of the book.
Going back three billion years, Rhenisch says British Columbia was formed by the drifting of continental plates. Chains of volcanoes formed along stress lines in the western Pacific, drifted east, and smashed into North America.
“Very little research has been done on this region,” he says. “I spent three months researching to find out what the story was. Everything we have in British Columbia is caused by continental plate movement. Rock is a record of a dance that happens in time.”
Rhenisch says he spent a lot of time to find a way to tell this story.
“It’s really the story of going out to the mountains and walking. We wanted the book to be the art of the mountains, where the mountains are creating the art. The earth is an expression of itself where you can walk across ground no one has ever walked on before. The earth is seeing itself for the first time through your eyes.”
He says through the images in Motherstone you can look back to the beginning of time.
“In fact you are standing in the middle. You’re part of it.”
Rhenisch says the name “motherstone” came to him as he was driving home to Campbell River from the Cariboo.
“It jumped into my head. The red rock south of Spences Bridge talked to me. It’s nice to feel in this vast, empty universe we’ve got a home. I’m of this place. I am this place speaking of itself. We are this place.”
Harris says his ultimate goal of his books is to create an awareness of the value of the natural world and biodiversity of the Cariboo Chilcotin region.
“Awareness affects public opinion about places,” he says, “and only public opinion affects change.”
More information on Motherstone: British Columbia’s Volcanic Plateau and details of the book launch schedule can be found on the chrisharris.com website. Soft cover copies of the book retail for $39.95, while limited edition, numbered and signed hard cover copies are $69.95. Only 700 hard cover editions have been printed.