Helaina Lalande & Ben Goss
Helaina Lalande is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Charlottetown, PEI. She enjoys making zines, comics and music. ‘Continents In Miniature’ is her first video installation.
Ben Goss is an emerging multimedia artist, composer and sound designer from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. His work is motivated by the historic and present effects of enduring change within the ecoregions of eastern North America. Ben is currently studying Human Environment at Concordia University.
Continents in Miniature
multimedia installation
Continents in Miniature is a multimedia installation incorporating film and sculpture to encapsulate the mystery of one of PEI’s most obscure ecosystems, the Krummholz: a type of coastal forest in which trees and other plants, stunted by the salt winds, grow slowly and low to the ground. Krummholz forests play a vital role in protecting the coast from erosion and wind damage during storms; however, they are presently under-researched. This project is an effort to bring attention to the necessity of protecting our coastlines, as well as an exploration of the role of mythmaking in bridging gaps of knowledge in the public consciousness.
The film portion of this project is a short fantasy-infused narrative outlining the ecological importance of Krummholz, set during the approach of a storm. Narrated in a style that is both informative and poetic, the film examines the philosophical implications of life existing in periphery. Being an ecotone, or transitional ecosystem between land and sea, Krummholz acts as a fluid border between two ways of being.
In the shelter of the forest, documentary-style footage captures glimpses of troll-like creatures hunkering down, hidden away at the fringes of reality. The existence of these creatures is a direct result of the inscrutability of their home terrain, as the untraversable nature of Krummholz means that they see little human interaction. This, combined with the lack of available information about Krummholz, and their inherent marginality, makes them somewhat of an enigma. What emerges are the perfect conditions for the birth of a new mythology.
Superimposed stop-motion animations of organic materials, inspired by the analog animation techniques in Geographies of Solitude (2022, dir. Jacquelyn Mills), adorn the film and add to its whimsical quality. The overlapping layers of images harken to the neither-here-nor-there state of the fantasy creatures. The creatures themselves are each modeled after species native to the Krummholz, with costumes fashioned from fabric, papier-mâché and found bits of foliage.