The Driftwood Whisperer

JEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: Introducing Tanya Bub

“I was an artist as a kid, though I never drew a direct line between that early art and what I do now until very recently. But in my shows, I usually create a whole cast of characters who are living in their own world. The very first show I did was inspired by a local beach in Victoria, off Dallas Road, which is where I collect my driftwood.

On that stretch of sea and shoreline are people doing all kinds of things. There are kite surfers, and dogs, and kids playing, and lovers walking hand in hand – it’s just this awesome space. So I decided to create – in driftwood – a scene from Dallas Road Beach. And when my dad saw it, he surprised me by saying: Oh wow – that’s what you used to do as a kid.

It was only then that I remembered: I used to collect the corks from wine bottles and make them into mice that were living inside little mouse houses. I’d make their legs out of matchsticks. I used tissue to create their heads and clothes. And I’d furnish their homes with all kinds of found objects. Like a metal bottle cap might be a pie plate and a postage stamp might become a picture on the wall.

So whatever it was that drove me to spend so much time and energy on all that – it must still be with me today.”

“I never formally studied sculpture, but I did a lot of life drawing in university and even in high school. I was very interested in that, and very interested in anatomy. And I think I just look at people – like I’m looking at your arm, I look at the way you’re leaning, how your neck is angled, and the way you’re tilting your head. What does that do to me? What does it make me feel? I do tend to be aware of that type of thing.

And when I’m creating a piece, I try to imagine it from my own body. How does that position feel? I’ll convert the animal’s posture to my own, so I can feel the weight of it and determine where my point of balance is. The balance is very important. There’s a visual balance but also a physical balance, because driftwood isn’t evenly weighted. So you kind of have to work with what is, to get it to sit or stand as opposed to just tipping over.”

“The thing about driftwood as a medium is: every single piece of it came from a tree. And that tree grew somewhere, and it had roots going deep into the ground, and it sucked all the water and nutrients it needed out of the earth. It was there for a very long time, and it was a home for birds and squirrels and skunks and raccoons and all kinds of insects. And maybe there was a landslide and the tree fell and it spent the next four years making its way down to a river. And when you look at a piece of wood, you can see so much of its history written right into its form: how it turned to get around a rock, how its holes were drilled by bugs…

And then finally it ended up in the ocean and spent who knows how long as a habitat for marine creatures, being carved by the tides. So my sculptures contain hundreds of such pieces and every one of them has a story.”

“Each of my life-sized animals is made of hundreds of pieces of wood. And I just love all those pieces! I love their color gradations: reddish and blackish and sun-bleached. All those colors are natural. I never paint; I never dye; I never stain. All the different shades you see are the natural colors of the wood itself. If you go to my studio, you won’t see a smidge of paint; you won’t see a drop of stain.

Most driftwood artists try to assemble homogenous pieces. Like they’ll want to work with all red cedar. So other people find their wood for them, and then they themselves finish the wood; they’ll sand down the surface and get a smooth processed texture. And here I am, thinking: why in the world would you do that? Because the individuality of the wood is what makes it so fantastic!

And I could never bear to use screws or nails as most of the others do. To me, it feels like a violation. All I use are glues and fixatives.

And one more difference I’ve noticed is that a lot of other driftwood artists have these very organized studios where the wood is pre-sorted into body parts, like wings or legs. But I get the inspiration from the wood. A given piece might be a nose, but it could also be an arm. I try not to impose my own agenda on any of my natural materials – I wait for them to tell me what they are.”

“My parents are both Jewish and my Mom is Israeli. We were pretty secular: agnostic to atheist-leaning, I would say. But my grandfather was the patriarch of the family so we did all the things. I can still hear his fantastic gravelly voice intoning: yom ha-shishi, va-yechulu ha-shamayim ve-ha’aretz ve-chol tzeva’am during all the Shabbat dinners where we’d all get together.

When we came here to Victoria, my grandfather was here, my mother and her husband were here, my uncle and aunt were here with their kids, and then I had another cousin who was here. And every single Friday, we would all get together and do the whole Shabbat dinner. Which created a very strong sense of family, and my grandfather was the one who glued it all together.”

“My mother grew up in Israel and served in the army and then later she lived in London, which is where she met and married my father. But she always wanted to go back to Israel.

My father agreed, but he was not Israeli and, you know, Israel is hard for non-Israelis. So we were there for about three years when I was a kid. And of course I spoke Hebrew there, and it actually stuck, but then we moved back to Canada. So to this day, I can speak Hebrew like a 5-year-old.

We moved back because my dad just really couldn’t hack it. I think he saw that my brother and I were becoming little Israeli kids, and he felt as if he were going to be sidelined, like the odd man out within our family. So when he was offered a position in a Canadian university, he pushed to bring the family back here.

And my mom was okay with it, but I think she was also a little wistful because she had just loved her Israeli childhood. She grew up in Haifa and there was just the feeling at that time that they were really doing something, they were pioneers, establishing this whole new reality. I mean, that was an amazing, amazing time to be there. Not easy at all, but the idealism! And the commitment to hard work: they were doing, they were making, they were creating something -- and they really were very idealistic. My mother still feels very connected to Israel. And it is an amazing place. I’m getting very nostalgic talking to you about it.”

“There’s a common feeling between Jews: the curiosity, the intellectualism, the earthiness, the warmth. When I meet another Jewish person, I feel all that. It’s relaxing, it’s warm, it’s easy. And I love the Jewish commitment to hospitality, and the high value put on education, but also on the questioning and formulating your own ideas and your own opinions.

A lot of Jews are kind of artistic too, and really into food, and especially food as a way of showing love. Like when someone comes into your house: the way you want to sit them down and feed them – that’s totally Jewish. I also think persecution creates a certain kind of intensity and grit and depth.

It’s very WASP-y here in Victoria but my best friend is a Jew and we talk every single day and we have such a Jewish relationship. We’re each the other’s psychoanalyst and we share that desire to understand things on a deeper level. You know, I just feel like: unless you’re doing that, you’re not even really having a conversation. And that’s a very Jewish thing, but it’s not how most people operate.”

“There are a lot of academics in my family, but I wanted to go to art school. So I applied and got in, but my dad didn’t want me to go. He took me on a trip to Montreal, to McGill, which is where my brother was going to school. I guess he thought that as an artist, I’d starve, but the funny thing is that he himself was a philosopher of science, and I took a page from his playbook and earned a Philosophy of Science degree from McGill. Which wasn’t exactly a lucrative proposition either. What a bizarre trade-off, right?

But I enjoyed it; I like intellectual science-oriented work too, and in fact, I authored two books about quantum physics with my father.

At any rate, after earning that degree, I did spend some time at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, studying ceramics and oil painting, which was great, but during a semester abroad at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts, I ran out of money and I kind of crashed and burned there, because I was trying to work and go to school at the same time. In fact, I totally went broke and couldn’t afford to come back and finish my art degree.

I did a few different jobs after that; I worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland, which is where I met my husband, and we both taught English in Korea for a while. But when we came back to Canada, we were renting a room from a friend and there was a computer in it. He offered to remove it but we told him it was fine, he could just leave it there. I had never even touched a computer before.

I just started playing around with it and I taught myself some basic design skills, because it was very easy at that time – all you needed was a little bit of HTML and a little bit of graphics. Then I got a job as a web developer after playing around on that computer by myself for 3 months. That was just lucky – no one could do that now, but then, everything was much simpler and much more hands-on.

I worked as a programmer for 25 years, and I did no art at all during that entire time.”

“What ultimately happened was that some personal family circumstances forced me to step away from programming for a couple of years and when I was looking to go back, I was no longer on the cutting edge with my skill set. In the computer world, new developments happen at warp speed, and if you’re not constantly keeping up, you can’t hold your own. And I also found I was no longer interested in resuming that kind of work.

But the idea of not going back to it also worried me, because my husband and I have always had a 50-50 split when it comes to earning and maintaining our home. And I’m a pretty terrible housekeeper. I don’t like cleaning and I don’t want to mow the lawn… but I realized that if I stepped away from earning my share of our expenses, all that domestic labor would fall to me.

So I felt driven to bring my income up to what it had been before, because I really didn’t want to be in the role of primary domestic laborer. It wasn’t that my husband was going to be punitive and coerce me into doing all the cleaning and laundry – it was that I knew I’d feel guilty if I was neither pulling my weight financially nor picking up the slack by doing extra housework. That wouldn’t feel fair to me.

So I was looking at the prospect of retraining in some way, and a friend said to me: “Why would you do that? Why don’t you take this opportunity to get back to your art?”

And the funny thing was, I felt insulted by that! Somehow I guess I internalized this message that art wasn’t a serious thing to do. Her suggestion felt dismissive to me – in a gendered way, even. My interpretation, which had only to do with my own hang-ups, was along the lines of: a real professional career is out of reach for you now, so why don’t you take up a hobby?

But of course that wasn’t what she was saying at all. Actually the opposite was true, even if I couldn’t see it at the time: she was taking my art seriously as a legitimate form of work, and she was right.

Anyway, soon after that, my daughter and I were walking on the beach and I found a piece of driftwood that looked just like an orca jumping out of the water: a breaching whale. I held it up to my daughter and asked what it made her think of, and immediately, she echoed my own thought: Orca.

And I held onto that piece, which eventually led me to start creating art out of driftwood.”

“People ask how I get started on a sculpture. What I do is: let’s say I want to make a lion. And I’ve got this huge collection of wood. So I go around my studio, and I’m like: lion… lion… like, I’m looking for a lion component. And because I’m thinking about a lion, a piece of driftwood might suggest the arch of a lion’s back.

So that’ll be the first piece. Now I’ll have the back. Then I go looking for the next piece, and because I have a lion on my mind, I see different pieces of wood that can serve as all the other limbs and parts and curves of the animal. But those pieces could just as easily be something else, if I looked at them with a different animal in mind.

So people often ask: how did you find that perfect piece? But I didn’t really. I was filtering for what I wanted, and I just put it in a given place, at a certain angle, because it was able to extend the illusion of an animal there.”

“Recently a local woman commissioned a driftwood bear cub. She and her wife had called each other “Bear” as an endearment. So a few months after her wife died, she asked me to create a bear cub, and on some level, she was hoping the spirit of her wife might somehow move into this piece. And driftwood is great for that! There’s no other medium like it in terms of creating a space for spirit to enter. Because there was a spirit in that tree, right? And in the animals who made it a home and in the water that polished it.

Something that often happens is the people who acquire my driftwood animals will find themselves talking with them all the time. Because there’s so much life in the wood, and there’s the life that I put into it too. The moment I place the eyes on an animal is when the spirit of the piece comes into being. I call that day its birthday. Until that moment, the assembly is more of a mechanical process, but once the eyes are in, there’s a presence in the studio with me, and I’m dancing with that spirit during the act of creation. And then finally there’s the life given to it by the person who buys it and what they bring to it.

For me, the work doesn’t stand alone; it’s about the relationship between the piece that I’ve crafted and the person who ultimately has it. And I find that as long as I keep a piece I’ve made, it’s not finished. When someone buys it and incorporates it into their home and talks to it and has a relationship with it, then it’s done.”

“Of all the work I’ve done in the last few years, one of the most meaningful projects to me was a collaboration with the street community here in Victoria. There’s a documentary about it now called Sitting With Grace.

Over my time working in the art gallery here, which is a co-op, I noticed that while everyone is super nice, whenever someone from the street community would walk in the door, there would be this alarmed response of: What are you doing here? Can I help you? You know, like really icy and forbidding: Can I help you?

Well, with an art gallery, anyone is supposed to be able to come in and browse, right? That’s the point of the space.

So I started to think about how I could challenge that kind of knee-jerk response, that prejudice against street people — especially within the gallery. And that led me to the creation of Sitting With Grace, a female figure that’s also a throne of sorts, made entirely of discarded materials – either litter or old broken stuff on its way to the curb. Only two components of the whole sculpture were purchased: the casters I used to put her on wheels so I could pull her around on the sidewalk, and various signs people were using to panhandle, which I incorporated into the piece.”

“Buying those signs was a great ice-breaker and changed the usual dynamic between the person panhandling and the person approaching them. Suddenly they had something I wanted, something I was willing to pay for.

And then I’d invite them to add more to the sculpture if they felt like it, and to sit on it and talk with me if they felt moved to do so.

The idea of grace is a kind of generosity or acceptance given by the viewer, which does not have to be earned. So I was trying to create a little bit of art magic with this piece, where if someone is sitting here, then you — the viewer — must listen to them without prejudice, with acceptance, with grace, which is something you have to find within yourself. So if this project had a goal, it was to deepen empathy, expand perspective, and let art be the vehicle that pulled people together into a more inclusive community.

I brought “Grace” (and pizza) to Centennial Square in Victoria during the summer of 2023. I had no idea whether anyone would actually sit down and share their story, but many people did.

Ultimately, the exhibit was a fundraiser for a local community center, Our Place, that supports homeless people with meals and a place to stay. The show raised over $8000 for the organization.”

“The whole project was a very poignant, moving experience for me. The street community is really a tight-knit family. They look out for each other and take care of each other. They’re incredibly warm and welcoming and kind, even though most of them have been through so much trauma. On the day I spent there, the community was mourning two of its members who had very recently passed away, and it was clear that the death of individuals within their cohort is something they face continually.

One woman I spoke with, Star, was able to articulate the heart and soul of Sitting With Grace far better than I had ever been able to do. Fortunately, her words were captured by the documentary. She said:

Everything [Grace] has that creates her beauty is something that was unwanted or thrown away. And that, you know, is such a statement in itself about certain groups of people within society that a lot of these statements [on the sculpture] came from. How is it that you can create something of such [stature] and beauty from what’s thrown away, but society can’t see that same vision and do that with so many people who are gifted in so many different ways?

Of all the emotional rewards that have come to me as a result of doing art, I don’t know if anything has ever made me happier than what she said next:

This [indicating Grace] is more of a statement for mental health than anything any government official has ever put out there.

Bet on that.

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To see more of Tanya’s work follow her on Instagram @VictoriaDrifter.