Inside an old barn on a dirt road in N.B., an artist creates a secret world

There are things you expect to find in a half-gutted old barn on the side of a dirt road in New Brunswick: rusty tractors, buckets of nails, fishing poles. Maybe a few mice gnawing the walls. 

Then there are unexpected and wonderful things.

Like a surreal garden of airborne flowers floating down the 9-metre length of the former hayloft. 

Hundreds of blossoms, handmade from drafting paper and reeds, swaying gently in a Charlotte County summer breeze.

“It’s a Cabinet of Curiosities back here,” said artist Ann Manuel, pulling back a black curtain at the rear of the loft to reveal piles of prototype paper poppies, lilies and wild columbine in various stages of construction, made from materials including paper, silk, wool and modelling tools, including 3D pen.

She twirls a half-metre-long teasel flower, constructed petal-by-petal out of delicate Japanese paper. “You never know what’s hanging in the barn.” 

‘A quiet event’

Breath is the tentative title for a large-scale art installation in progress by Manuel, an award-winning artist who has worked for more than three decades across North America, the UK, Europe and Asia and currently resides in Fredericton. 

The work, which was originally titled Forecast, was inspired by the experience of witnessing her mother’s final breath — and her mother’s dying wish to see the flowers from her garden somehow preserved.

“It just seemed to be such a powerful, singular event,” Manuel said. “A quiet event — but essential for everything. I thought, ‘how do I work with breath in my work? I can’t paint it, I can’t make a print about it.’

So I thought, ‘I need to do an installation that somehow embodies that.'”

After museum closure — a work in limbo

In 2018, she successfully proposed the idea to the New Brunswick Museum: an “ascending garden” made of seed pods, where visitors can wander among various garden rooms. The Canada Council for the Arts, and Arts NB also saw the seed of brilliance in the idea, funding it with various grants.

Manuel got to work on the installation, which was purpose-built for the lower gallery of the New Brunswick Museum and tentatively slated to open in 2020. 

That also happened to be when the provincial museum at Market Square would close for exhibitions, never to reopen. 

With the pandemic looming over artists, and a destination for her work in limbo, Manuel was left holding Breath — seemingly indefinitely. 

“I almost was in disbelief,” Manuel said.

Her Canada Council grant was dependent on having an exhibition scheduled. She also needed photo documentation of the completed work if she wanted to explain the concept to future galleries and funders. 

 “It felt like a weight on my back,” she said. 

Time to breathe

Gradually, she realized the only way to lift that weight would be to find somewhere to install the work and document it — even if it wasn’t in the public gallery space she initially envisioned. 

“There’s a lot of things I might be on my deathbed and not regret, but I think I would regret not working through this visual problem, you know?”

The solution came when a “dear friend” offered Manuel the use of the barn as a studio space. 

“The project then had more time to breathe — and the ideas and the parameters changed,” she said.

With the help of more friends, she crafted hundreds of seed pods and flowers. She spent hours perched on ladders and scaffolding in the barn, hanging blossoms in various configurations from the ceiling, adjusting the height of each monofilament line until she achieved her perfect flow.

“Each time that I’m making one of those little petals, I’m thinking how you can’t come close to what Mother Nature can do. Humans can try to replicate it, copy it, paint it, whatever,” she said. 

“The most you can do is try to create that feeling.”

The blessing of a cancelled exhibition

As she created the piece alone in the barn, Manuel came to reflect on what she calls “the blessing of a cancelled exhibition.”

Art, she realized, can have impact and beauty even if it’s seen only by a small handful of trusted friends — or no one at all. 

“I don’t need anyone to see it, really,” she said. 

While the current work-in-progress isn’t open to the public, she’s toying with the idea of installing the finished work in an abandoned building somewhere in her home province of Newfoundland — where space would be limited only by her imagination, and no gallery rules or constraints would apply. 

Whatever happens, she said, will unfold as it should, in its own time. 

The process has taught her to “see the wisdom of nature in anything that we’re going through in life.”

“Any life process, nature’s doing it already. And much more eloquently, quietly, and graciously.”