Nurturing Darkness: Meditations on the root cellars of Newfoundland (the artwork of Carol Bajen-Gahm)

Commentary by Emily Deming

Also like fairy tales, these pieces are about place. Place through colour and shape. Place “funnelled through the subconscious” and abstracted by the artist. The sense of depth and of danger is very real, and the colours she pulls from everywhere around her. The Atlantic Ocean, right below her studio in Torbay, Newfoundland is “so multicoloured with the atmosphere and with what is growing under it; it can look Caribbean, even though you know…” What she knows, what we know from the work, is the danger of the deep, the scarcity of warmth, and hence its value. Root cellars must not freeze; must not overheat. Small dark pockets of stable temperature and still air, pockmarking a coast of ice and wind and violent mutability.