“A really powerful and visceral experience.” That’s what Indigenous multidisciplinary artist Carey Newman calls watching a towering old-growth cedar cut down before his eyes deep in a West Coast forest a decade ago. “You just don’t hear it, you feel it. It shakes the ground around you.”
It was the first time the 50-year-old master carver and Impact chair in Indigenous art practices at the University of Victoria had watched a tree that he was going to work on felled in the forest — a German client had requested that it be filmed. But it also planted the seed of an idea: how to utilize second-growth cedar in crafting totem poles for commercial and non-traditional clients instead of the rapidly vanishing old-growth trees used for Indigenous and cultural purposes.
As Newman puts it: “How do I honour that commitment? Not to cut down old growth strictly for profit any more.”
The result: a new mechanism, a sort of high-tech tool that trims cedar logs into beams that can be tapered, fit and held together while a carver works on them, as if working on a singular totem pole. Plus, there’s a rotational device that can turn these held- together cedar beams as the carver works.
Call it “Totem 2.0.” Newman does.
“The idea behind it is the same idea behind — I hate to put it this way — but a rotisserie chicken,” says Dr. Richard Gale, director of Camosun Innovates, the applied research and development centre at Camosun College that brought Newman’s idea to life with the help of half- a-dozen mechanical engineering students.
“By turning a crank, you can rotate all of them together, in either direction, so that Carey can take his tools to those collected 12 beams and carve them as if they were one coherent, old- growth cedar trunk.”
One mechanism is now in use, with a second, more refined version soon to come.
As for Newman, he wants the plans for this unique mechanism to be open source, “so that institutions, other artists are able to build them for themselves if they want.”
He adds: “It will be available to other carvers. I’m interested in this from a purpose-based perspective of protecting old growth. So any carver who wants to make a totem this way, I would welcome it.”
