Catabasis and Concatenation: On the Threshold of an Edmonton Underworld
Creators: Darcy Fraser Macdonald
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2025

<p>My MFA thesis exhibition, entitled This Show is Trash, had its genesis in the Fall of 2020 when I first began collecting historical trash objects from the North Saskatchewan river valley in what is colonially known as Edmonton, Alberta. In the first half of the 20th century, waste was deposited as fill in ravines, gullies and along the banks of the river up until the immediate post-war period (circa 1947) and has been locked away underground since. It is only now coming to light again as winter ice scours the banks and spring floods carry away the soil. The waste objects which are exposed are contemporaneous with the Edmonton of my paternal grandparents; it is their trash and the trash of the community around them. The dump can be seen as an alternative archive, where the materials therein were originally de-selected for their anti-importance, but now feel as though they have a mysterious and purposeful story to tell. When I am down at the river mud larking, there is a particular state which I enter into, a bit like a trance. It seems to be necessary, or at least beneficial, for finding the objects which have become important to my thesis work. At first, things look to be indistinguishable piles of rubble, often covered in a layer of greyish-brown silt and nothing in particular will stand out. Then slowly, as my mind calms and my eyes refocus, objects of interest will begin to show themselves. With only an old hiking backpack, some canvas buckets and a small trowel as tools I collect what speaks to me and make the laborious climb back up through the woods to the top of the riverbank. Once back at my studio with trash-treasures in tow I begin the next step of the process; carefully cleaning and studying the objects and materials which will become inspiration for, or components of, my artwork. The cleaning process is somewhat similar to the discovery process. Objects are carefully examined and their itinerant dirt is gently removed if possible. And often during this step new and exciting discoveries will be made too. Perhaps a bit of text, colour or pattern will emerge, or some identifying feature which points towards an object’s original use. Once clean and dry, new acquisitions will join the collection where they can begin to interact with other pieces as part of the shifting assemblage space of the studio. My thesis work centres on a selection of 8 of these discarded objects/materials retrieved from the Rat Creek dumpsite with the addition of two familial artifacts from the 1940s, one from each of my paternal grandparents. The latter two objects, much like the discarded elements from the dump, had been long abandoned in the family basement and not considered to have any particular value. As I began to investigate the historic dump objects and consider the older version of my city from the early 20th century, it became apparent how connected the two things were. There is a vast underworld of legacy waste normally hidden from view; the ancestors of our modern trash. Each bit of waste has a story to tell - of migration, of tragedy, of beauty. This long-buried, abandoned dumpsite is the unseen underworld of our city, the place where my grandparents’ settler-colonial Edmonton has been interred. The riverbank acts as a threshold between the two worlds; that which belonged to them and that which belongs to us. I have chosen ten objects, to serve as seeds or starting points, to explore the complex legacies that previous generations have bequeathed to us, questioning how we might reconcile with these inheritances in a contemporary context. This exhibition is the evidence of my journey to the edge of the underworld. The seed objects which I have chosen have made a hero’s anabasis - they have returned from the land of the dead.</p>