$8-MILLION OCEAN DISCOVERY CENTRE FEATURES OUTSTANDING WORK
BY VANCOUVER ISLAND ARTISTS
There’s more than the underwater world of the Salish Sea to discover at Sidney, B.C.’s new Shaw Ocean
Discovery Centre. The undersea theme is strengthened by the designs of local artists.
The Centre’s gateway is graced by a simulated kelp bed—17 glass panels created by Sidney glass artist
Rick Silas. To produce his rendition of a kelp bed in a room only one-tenth the height of real bull kelp
was a unique artistic challenge for Silas.
“You wouldn’t believe all the designs we went through,” Silas recalls. “There were several
configurations, whole walls and many, many changes until we came to the final design.” During two
months of experimentation, Silas reached a turning point when the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre dive
team delivered some live kelp to his Sidney studio.
“I laid that out and it really gave me the information I needed from the real thing—handling it, looking at
the texture, understanding it more, the scale and the colours.”
In keeping with the aquarium’s conservation theme, 12 of the 17 tempered glass panels are made from
reclaimed shower doors. Silas, who invented the patented Silastial Art Glass, does more than 70 percent
of his work with recycled glass.
All but one of the panels is laminated back to back to “create the dimensional element, and the perfect
read from both sides that we needed,” he said.
Silas’s modern art is balanced by traditional Coast Salish paintings depicting Salish Sea wildlife and
themes by T’sartlip First Nation artist Charles Elliott. Great blue heron, wolf-eel, salmon, and orca, are
among 10 works created by Elliott.
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“The Salish Sea surrounds us,” says Temoseng, as he is known by his people. “We use it for our
highways, our sources of food. We still define our boundaries by sea.”
As a youngster whittling driftwood on the beaches of Brentwood Bay, Temoseng discovered early in life
that he “was born to be a carver.” Now, more than half a century later, he has earned international acclaim
as a carver, painter, and teacher of traditional Coast Salish designs. While he has produced many
individual drawings of ocean animals, the pieces he has created for the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre are
his first collection of multiple images portraying Salish Sea wildlife.
“To see all the different images in one place is very important to me. I want the general public to be able
to see a good example of what Coast Salish art looks like, through the different sea life.”
Other artworks are subtler. In fact, most visitors won’t immediately view them as art, but will appreciate
the atmosphere they create. Victoria artist Sandra Ritter brought a touch of realism to the centre’s deepsea elevator and jetty pilings. As the artist who worked on the Royal BC Museum’s Open Oceans exhibit,
she’s a veteran of making things look like they belong in the ocean.
Finally there’s the wallpaper. Yes, the wallpaper is art. Experts at Speedpro Signs of Sidney took a 15by-28-centimetre composite image and scaled it up to over four metres tall, a major feat in itself. After
printing, they laminated the watery images on wooden boards that eventually were laid out on the wall
like a three-dimensional jigsaw.
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