Sculptor Isla Burns

Isla Burns is a senior Alberta steel sculptor who has been part of what many call Edmonton's "big steel" era, one though that showed early on dissident traits as to what the canon might be. Steel to her was always not just industrial scrap metal but material with a soul, only if one could listen to it. Even when she used found "steel" pieces to construct her early works, she welded them with such impeccable seams, curved the pipes, polished the steel until to some did not even look like steel any longer: soft, inviting to the touch, transformed into an object with personal history.

Letter to the Greeks 2 Tinos

The more Burns got to know steel the more she used it as Tiniot sculptors use marble; the more steel revealed to her its secrets, the more Isla allowed her spiritual side to become present in her art. The more free she felt the more she allowed 'accidents" to remain in her art. Increasingly, each piece became an altar, a votive, a prayer for a friend. Her memories of her early childhood in India form palimpsests of possibilities; time and space became reversible, what matters in the narrative, the memory, the offering. A viewer can spend hours deciphering the layers, the over-writes, the over-polish, the wonderful excessive abandon for all things beautiful and human.

When Isla Burns visited Tinos, she felt at home. Tinos, an island that has been part of sculptural and spiritual history in Greece since pre-historic time. As much as knew of the place and its history, she was nor prepared to run into a later day Hephestos ( the god of fire and a metal smith) in the face of Costas Alexopoulos, the metal smith in the village of Pyrgos, a village that is the birthplace of all classical sculptors of the modern Greek nation.

Costas Alexopoulos is the last of a thousand years old tradition of black smiths who have been crafting the tools and chisels that have been used in marble carving for thousands of years. His tools are used in the restoration of the Parthenon and by most of the fine arts departments in Europe and North America. When Isla visited his workshop,

Blacksmith Costas Alexopoulos

where he works the metal on open fire, without protection other than the instinctual knowledge he has gathered over the years, he watched her carefully how her eyes brightened watching him work; when he was told that she is a steel sculptor, he showed her what he was doing through sign language; when he saw that she understood everything, he let her finish what he was doing. Full of admiration, he declared in Greek: "this one, she was born before the devil!"

Isla left a piece of her heart on Tinos and she can't wait to go back, first with the "Migrations" exhibit and later, in the summer of 2005 for her own one person exhibit as part of the Guest House series at The Exhibition House in Falatathos. She already has started sending "letters" to the Greeks....