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Visual artist Nigel Roe graces PEI's arts community thanks to accidents and inspirations. Once, he thought he wanted to be an oceanographer. A career in the arts hadn't occurred to him-but in his neighbourhood in Montreal, he was inspired by a professor from the Ecole des beaux arts-an artist, who had "a house painted with flowers, a sports car, a gorgeous wife, a zany dog-and his studio in his living room." The professor encouraged Nigel to go to NSCAD in the early seventies, at the height of the conceptual art movement. "It was a shock, coming from Quebec. I had thought I knew what I was doing. But the art world had been flipped on its head." The climate was challenging, but Roe stuck it out, and the lessons stuck. "Ten years after I left, I finally appreciated it," he says.
Serendipity led him to Prince Edward Island, and more time taught more lessons. "I came to look after someone's house and stayed," he says. "I had looked at Prince Edward Island as a very temporary place-and my wife was in the same situation. I guess we were always looking for somewhere else, but never found it." Soon, Roe was involved in the beginnings of the Great George Street Gallery. Then he got involved part-time at the then-thriving Holland College School of Visual Arts, where serendipity followed hard on his heels in the form of Henry Purdy. "I had never thought of being a teacher, but one day Henry called, and I decided to give it a stab." One day a week teaching turned to two, then to three. Nowadays, he and Sandy Carruthers coordinate Holland College's whole Visual Communications programme.
Over his years as an artist and teacher, Roe has seen PEI lose its artist-run centre and its school of visual arts, and he and others in the core artistic community have "all worn the same hat several times." (He himself has just taken on the role of representing PEI on the national arts lobby group-a position he previously had filled for ten years). He would gladly pass the torch to a new generation of politically active, socially aware young artists. But as he recognizes in his own graphic design students, young artists are facing different challenges-challenges of technology, since "we no longer cut and paste with scissors and glue"; challenges in the lack of provincial funding for programmes to "curate, disseminate, and exhibit work that's done here"; challenges to figure out "what to do for a living." He is nonetheless inspired by emerging interest in design as important to the objects around us, and he sees space for social critique through visual communications. His students, he hopes, will contribute their "fresh, raw brains" to "an overworked marketplace."
Even so, teaching remains a sideline that makes possible his work as an artist creating paintings, multimedia, and handmade paper. At the moment, he is collaborating with Hilda Woolnough to create "a book for all seasons" for UPEI President Wade MacLauchlan. The project began as a simple enough request for some handmade paper for a kind of guest book that would interpret the story of MacLauchlan's home and property. It has taken on greater dimensions-four full dimensions, in fact, since the "book" will now be a box of books designed to change over the seasons. Roe's paper will be graced by Woolnough's prints on alchemical and astrological themes, and the box will be embedded with artifacts-like sea heather-from its surroundings and will interpret history and environment with flax-based paper as a reminder of flax farmers who once worked the land. The books will also invite guests to contribute feedback, adding to the locality's unfolding story.
Roe says he is inspired also by contemporary possibilities for "wrapping an audience in a whole experience" using mixed media, multimedia, and technology, but while he likes the idea of blending more technology into future work, he's not sure that's where serendipity will lead. His plans remain flexible. He says, as he has said before, "I'll find out if I want to do that when I get there."