Nova Scotia artists Sydney Lancaster and Eva McCauley both talk about the ocean with passion, poetry and ecological concern; yet their artwork and its specific inspirations are very different. Both artists are interested in printmaking, the nature of time and memory, suggested narratives, and ambiguity. Each imbeds a complexity of meaning to be found within the depths of their work.

Sydney Lancaster is drawn to the Bay of Fundy with its highest-tides-in-the-world and finds interest in the Age of Sail and the intersections of place, history, memory, and time. Her solo exhibition Macromareal (a tidal term meaning “big sea”) in August 2024, at Harvest Gallery, Wolfville included cyanotype prints and found buoys with marine imagery and text.

An Edmonton-born artist living in Wolfville, Lancaster first encountered the Bay of Fundy tides on a visit to Parrsboro with her partner, a geologist. Parrsboro is a small town famous for both its geological make-up and ship-building history. She “became fascinated by the power of the tides” and developed an urge to explore this natural phenomenon, in particular “to understand how people interacted with it.”

Lancaster roamed Parrsboro’s rocky, debris-strewn beaches collecting nets and buoys pushed up by the tide. She saw the vestiges of human interaction with “this highly complex environment” in the remnants of wharves, rail beds, and bridges on both sides of the Minas Basin, in Parrsboro and Wolfville, where her home backs onto Acadian dykes.

A formative zodiac outing with Parrsboro artist and Dinatours boat operator Randy Corcoran, who is “hauling stuff in all the time,” revealed the vast amount of garbage in the water. Lancaster describes Corcoran as a person who sees collecting garbage as “part of his responsibility, as someone living on the water,” and it is clear she feels that duty also. In her own work buoys recovered from the water are a “visual cue” for “what we leave behind.”

Lancaster’s sensuous, watery blueprints on wood and paper combine photographs of the Parrsboro area (including Partridge Island and its working fishing weir) with maps, compasses, and images of ships. The text in her work is drawn from navigational and sailor training manuals as well scientific papers. There is a veil of mystery, a ghostliness, in the seemingly figurative buoys; sinking beneath the waterline they impart a sense of danger. In her work Lancaster wants to acknowledge that human history is only “drop in the bucket over geological time,” but that, in this time, we’ve made an “enormous impact.” With Macromareal she reminds us that our future depends on action and “choosing what we do wisely.”

In Eva McCauley’s exhibition Ruptured Landscape, on display in August at ARTSPLACE, in Annapolis Royal, the artist exhibited high-contrast, apocalyptic landscapes with figurative elements. Her turbulent seas and skies dwarf tiny figures as she explores visual ways to talk about the climate emergency. The Bear River artist and traditional Irish musician subverts 19^th century Romantic and sublime painting to create a “toxicity” of high-contrast colours–searing yellows and greens, bruised purples and dancing turquoises–to evoke a feeling of unease in the viewer. Yet, she wants people to take away hope not despair, explaining “I believe the greater awareness people have the greater chance we have that people can solve this. Things can shift quickly.”

Originally from Kitchener, Ont., McCauley was a figurative painter and printmaker, until a life-changing encounter with the ocean off the west coast of Ireland. She spent five summers as artist-in-residence at the Cill Rialaig Project in a pre-famine village (circa 1790); where, in the vivid greens and ever-changing coastal light, she sensed past lives in her stone, cliff-top cottage. Despite a disbelief in ghosts, the artist describes feeling the “presence of people” of waking in the night and thinking “there is somebody here.” Back in Ontario, McCauley started painting large landscapes, realizing “these people really wanted to enter my paintings,” as she says and explains that her “little figures accentuate the feeling of not being in control and engulfed by what’s going on, by the climate crisis.”

Working in acrylic paint and photo-transfer, McCauley’s painting technique is inspired by the monotype printing process—her way of working both reductive and additive. The results are layered colours and wide energized smears. She describes layering colours on top of one another and then pulling the top layers away in places to reveal colour beneath as “having the image mysteriously emerge,” and likens its unpredictability to “archaeology, like excavating.”

In her work “Fractured Sky, Ruptured World” McCauley literally ruptured the surface of her paint by leaving the many-layered diptych outdoors to crack in the winter cold. Then, she applied heat to allow her to re-work parts of the surface. McCauley uses photocopy transfers of figures to allude to the passage of time and to memory itself as “fractured.” Some figures are detailed while others are ghostly blurs.

A former sessional teacher at the University of Waterloo, McCauley views Bear River as a magical, artist-filled village on a tidal river, and explains “the feeling of the tide going in and out every day is fantastic and there is a really powerful energy.” Yet, she has noticed the impacts of climate change in Nova Scotia in wildfires and flooding. She comments on the complexity of being “struck by the beauty of the land and sea in Nova Scotia” while also acknowledging “we’re in a climate crisis. We may have reached the tipping point already.”

Both Lancaster and McCauley, through powerful artworks that are both beautiful and discordant, belong to a growing number of artists in Atlantic Canada, and beyond, who feel compelled to explore ecological crisis with honesty, fear and hope.