About this work
The first thing the eye registers is the bay's wide, unhurried sweep — and then the poles. A battered row of totem poles curves along the old village site, many of them mortuary poles rising high with square-fronted tops, the whole scene smothered under a green tangle of growth.
Painted in oil on canvas at a commanding 89.5 by 148 centimetres , *Skedans* fills its panoramic format with a procession of weathered cedar totems tilting at every angle along the Haida Gwaii shoreline. The overall scene is unified by expressive brushwork, and the treatment of the thoughtfully articulated totem carvings is consistent with the landscape, reasserting their spiritual connection to one another. Carr positioned herself directly in the scene: she has situated her easel among the logs on the beach , and that intimate vantage point lends the composition an immediacy no ethnographic survey could achieve. The palette moves between chromatic greys of sun-bleached cedar and the lush, saturated greens of encroaching forest — colour doing the work of both elegy and vitality at once.
A 1910 trip to Paris had energized Carr's more radical stylistic inclinations; exposed to the Fauves, she expanded her palette to include bold, saturated colours applied with loose, animated brushwork. In 1912, working feverishly in her new style, she mounted a six-week expedition to visit fifteen First Nations villages, including Skedans in Haida Gwaii. The village — known in Haida as K'uuna Llnagaay, meaning "edge village" — was already largely abandoned by the time Carr arrived. She submitted *Skedans* to the landmark 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art in Ottawa, for which she constructed the painting's current frame out of found wood.
The exhibition connected her for the first time to the Group of Seven, reenergizing her career and leading to the expressive body of work for which she is now best known.
*Skedans* is a masterpiece of the artist's early period — notable for its monumental scale, it demonstrates the modern sensibility and artistic verve that Carr had acquired while studying in France, applied to the subject that would fuel her throughout her career.
As wall art, *Skedans* commands space without demanding drama. Its horizontal sweep suits a long wall — a hallway with height, a living room where one wall is given over entirely to looking. Natural light brings out the subtleties of the grey-green palette; warmer evening light deepens the sense of solitude. This is a painting for someone drawn to landscape with moral weight — to art that holds beauty and loss in the same breath. Carr was an inquisitive outsider concerned by a culture on the brink of extinction, and her treatment
