I first befriended Sydney Lancaster at Java Jacks, my workplace and honorary home. She ordered a latte and offered to transport my luggage from Rocky Harbour to Woody Point for me. In the weeks of her residency, I encountered Sydney many times, and always found her thoughtful and witty, even before she’d had her coffee. I became familiar with her life and art before interviewing her. Through conversations had on the times she and her husband generously transported me to work and over various cups of coffee, I gleaned some insight into Sydney, the person, and of course, jumped at the chance to interview Sydney, the artist.

Sydney was drawn to the natural, raw beauty of Gros Morne like so many others, but had another reason to apply for the residency: a collaboration with husband and geologist, John. The couple had previously visited the park on a geological expedition, multi-tasking by scoping out potential sites for a future installation, before finding the perfect setting– Green Point. While it’s not their first collaboration together, it’s the first one of this scale- and the first to meld their disciplines in such an elegant manner.

Astonishingly, she’s still in the early stages of her artistic career– in 2005, Sydney threw herself wholeheartedly into being a full-time artist. She’d had a variety of jobs beforehand, in English, modelling, human resources, staff training, arts administration, copy editing, contract writing, and running two different businesses- a home based artisanal business and a first aid training venture.

Her practice is multidisciplinary, and has been steadily evolving over the past few years, slowly becoming more photography based. Gel transfer and printmaking is a large part of her work, as well as assemblage and found object pieces. The installation pieces created here, including Boundary|Time|Surface, the largest piece Sydney has ever done at 150 metres long, are a combination of the two dimensional work, and the assemblage. It’s all a matter of scale- Sydney first started bringing her pieces outside so that she could work outside the size limits a traditional gallery space required.

She told me: “I wanted to work really simply and use my body as a tool. There is a performative aspect, of pushing my own physical limitations, to figure out what I can do, and how far I can take things. It’s about finding creative ways of working in space, connecting the human world and natural world and being as gentle to the earth as possible.”

The primary rules Sydney sets for herself in these outdoor installation pieces are as follows: minimal tools, mostly her own body were to be used. Whatever she was putting into the landscape has to come from the site or close to the site. And no material could go into the site that would have any kind of negative impact on the environment. Just by hearing a synopsis of her work, one can tell that she sticks close to the rules: her ongoing project, Make Believe, consists of living trees. Laughing, she told me that “No trees were killed in the making of the project! You can go one year and it’ll look a certain way and go another year and it’ll look different, because the structure is living. It’s a collaboration between me and the trees, and it’ll never look the same way twice.”

There is a performative aspect to her work, and I asked her if she thought anything was lost in the documentation of the installation pieces. Sydney said that “Some of it is very in the moment, very process based. Depending on the individual piece, there are different take aways for an audience after the fact. The interesting thing about this particular project (Boundary|Time|Surface) is that we documented ferociously. We gathered over 600 still images from the piece at Green Point that day. While it is not the same as being there in that moment, it’s probably the closest one could get to that kind of experience at a remove.” She commented on the stillness and tranquility of the piece that the photographs captured.

Because much of her work takes place outdoors, Sydney was subject to the tide and weather. Sometimes her careful planning didn’t work with unpredictable Gros Morne rain. But these days were not wasted- a large amount of pre-planning was required for Boundary|Time|Surface, over two and a half weeks worth of work. The tech had to be checked to ensure that the art could be photographed. Logs and rocks had to be gathered from other spots in the park to create the structures. The pieces had to be pre-placed, the spacing paced, problems solved before they even happened. What if it rains? What if the camera breaks?

The other work Sydney’s done while here is mostly photography and gel transfer prints, but she’s recently done a small scale installation with pencil slate also at Green Point, and was dreaming up some ideas for block prints in her last few days, although outdoor installation was certainly the focus of her visit.

Sydney wistfully mentioned that she ‘would love to stay here, for the rest of the summer, at least, and continue developing work. I have enough right now that I can certainly develop a fully realized body of work. Having said that, I would love to come back next summer. When you work in a space for a certain amount of time, you start to respond to the landscape on a deeper level and there’s more of a conversation that takes place with the place.’

I asked what Sydney would miss most about her residency, and she mentioned the amazing people, fantastic community, and the breaktaking landscape, saying ‘There’s such a raw, visceral beauty to this place that I will miss deeply.’ Funnily enough, she also rhapsodized about the coffee at Jennifer Galliott’s Galliott Studios, and at Java Jacks, where ‘everyone (at Java Jacks) has been lovely. That’s been our go to spot for coffee and sustenance to and from Green Point.’

She finished our interview with this: ‘It’s a lovely change to come from a city of a million people where crossing the street is an extreme sport, and come to a lovely little town. You can kick down the roads, and there aren’t a lot of cars, and people say hello and they look you in the eyes. It’s been beautiful. It’s been a really great thing.’

Sydney is moving on to Nova Scotia to visit with a few of her kids before heading to another residency called the Red Rabbit Intensive Series, on the Bay of Fundy. She will be building a collaborative ephemeral work with several other artists.

You can find out more about Sydney’s work and Gros Morne residency on her website: http://sydneylancaster.ca/