Marcia Huyer

strata 2021
Site-specific installation / Installation in situ
Site 2 – The Matthews House, Duntara

In conceiving of strata Marcia Huyer drew upon a quintessential aesthetic of the Bonavista Peninsula and historic houses in Newfoundland: the tattered layers of wallpaper built up over decades of lives lived in these cherished family spaces. These layers of patterned paper are the ephemeral remains of efforts to decorate, eroded and made frail by the passage of time. Exhuming and expanding this decorative domestic residue, Huyer adroitly flips the interior onto the exterior of a classic Newfoundland saltbox house. In doing so, through strata Huyer places the slightness of human action, a historic material accrual of domestic settler occupation, against the grand scale and unrelenting natural forces of the Bonavista Peninsula.

Primarily working in sculpture and installation, Huyer’s practice often makes the intangible substantial, shifting perception and consciousness in the process. strata mines a tension in history, between settler efforts to subjugate space and land to Euro-centric notions of beauty, and the unyielding primacy of the natural world. This primacy is acutely felt on an island and peninsula buffeted by the unrelenting force of the North Atlantic. Often the houses in which the layered fragments of wall-paper are found have a history of human displacement precipitated by state relocation programs or decline of the fishery—which is true of Duntara, the community where Huyer’s installation is based.

Efforts to make the town of Duntara aware of the project resulted in community members interacting with Huyer and her installation team, contributing through painting or providing examples drawn from their own homes. 

MH