The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) has a new President, is getting prepared to launch out in new directions and is also trying to raise $30,000 by the end of the month. The first two of those announcements may be interrelated, the third definitely is not. It is a result of two large contracts coming to an end, more on that later. First, Mike Moore has been one of FOCI’s members for decades and is now taking on a more active leadership role.
Continue reading FOCI: Continuity & Change
Andrea Padovani is a professional artist who has been living on Cortes for much of the last 17 years, but there is a sense in which his show ‘Deep Breath,’ which opens in the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery this Friday, is his introduction to the larger island community.
He explained, “I have a problem expressing my real deep feelings in a conversation, if you really want to know me, look at my paintings. That this really represents a hundred percent of what I am.”
Cortes Currents: Do you find people get it?
Andrea Padovani: “10 percent.”
Continue reading Deep Breath: How Andrea Padovani Sees Cortes Island
Iris Steigemann was an artist before she came to Cortes island in 1980, but for the last five or six years her work has taken on a new focus.
“I’ve been painting icebergs. What fascinates me is the underneath of the iceberg. You usually see a quarter to a third of an iceberg above the water. Under the water, it’s kind of a dream landscape. I like to play around with that,” she explained.
“There is also the environmental aspect of it. The ice cap there is melting way faster than what was expected. The thickest part of the ice cap in Greenland is about three kilometers deep. They’re doing ice cores of this and they can actually see what kind of weather there was, what was happening on earth at those times. Now this is all melting. They break off and a lot of them from Ilulissat Icefjord actually float around to the Canadian side. They drift down the east coast and then they melt.”
Continue reading Coming July 5: Iris Steigemann, Adrift Above The Arctic CircleThe Creative Spaces Garden and Studio Tour is Saturday June 22, from 10 am to 4 pm. This is an annual fundraiser for the Cortes Island Museum, as well as a showcase of some of the island’s hidden gems.
“It’s a great opportunity to feature creative talents of people on the island, and it’s a self guided tour of studios and gardens that takes you all the way around from Whaletown, down to Smelt Bay, and Cortes Bay. We’ve got painters, textile artists, weavers, spinners, ceramicists . We’ve got a number of potters and pottery studios that are participating. And then some beautiful spaces with gardens that range from low bluff to high bluff. You pick up a map, which includes a button, and you just go around the island visiting people with talents you may not have known about, or see spaces that you were curious about but never had an opportunity to actually walk into. Walk through the gates and see what people are growing there,” explained Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Cortes Island Museum.
Continue reading The 2024 Creative Spaces Garden and Studio Tour On Cortes Island
Around 60 representatives from social profits on Cortes, Quadra, and a number of the other islands recently gathered at Hollyhock. One of the breakout sessions was on climate adaption. Cortes Currents subsequently met with Max Thaysen, facilitator of that workshop, as well as Bruce Ellingsen, a participant.
“I was asked to host a conversation about climate adaptation, which we expanded into climate mitigation, stopping the pollution that’s causing the damage and adjusting our systems and life ways to be able to tolerate the pollution and the damage,” explained Thaysen.
Continue reading Climate Adaptation workshop on Cortes Island
