As one of New Brunswick’s more diverse artists, Alanna Baird has maintained her creative arts practice for 47 years, beginning in ceramics as a studio potter. Now a multidisciplinary artist, Baird is one of the first creatives in eastern Canada using recycled materials to address environmental concerns and has become well known for her signature tin fish.
A material based practice has allowed Baird’s work to crisscross techniques and includes printmaking, ceramics, plastic, metal and recycled materials. Constantly moving between materials and techniques, taking ideas from one to another, her work weaves ideas into stories intimately related to the sea and her shoreline.
With a 24 foot tidal range, Baird walks with her muse on the floor of the sea and is gifted treasures. Artifacts, organic or manmade, revealed by receding waters, speak to her. Sea creatures offer up their remains. Invasive species appear, others vanish. Plastic gathers. The ocean is the depths from which her work emerges.
The Bay of Fundy’s influence surfaces in this series of bronze sea urchins. Baird dives deeply into her mathematical and science background while exploring pentaradial symmetrical patterns. This exploration of surface decoration in wax “pots” led towards removal of surface areas, exposing the negative space as its own presence. Leaving just enough, a partial shell, to maintain structural integrity while exposing the beauty of the interior. In keeping with the destructive forces at play in the sea, she delights in the surprises of process that allow light and air to flow through her work, casting shadows that become monumental. Physical work receding, while shadows proclaim continued presence.
Baird has received numerous awards for her environmentally themed work. Notably the 2024 Marie Hélène Allain Fellowship – Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation for work in plastic for exhibition in Future Oceans: Awaken New Depths, Calgary, AB and the 2022 Eidlitz Award for Integration of Natural Science and the Arts – Sunbury Shores Arts & Nature Centre, NB. In 2023 her work in plastic was featured in High Tide/marée haute, a component of the Fifth International Marine Protected Areas Conference, Vancouver, BC.
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