John Greer finds art gives him an invaluable structure in life. Expressing himself in form is more important than a visual language.
Professor of sculpture for 26 years at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, John was the catalyst for the ‘Halifax Sculpture’ movement in the 1990s which was rooted in minimalism and conceptualism.
Inspiration for his sculpture often comes from Ancient Celtic stones and Greek sculpture and he likes the merging of cultural and natural history.
He discusses a number of projects he has created over the years, and Gail Skoff took photographs of some of his more recent works.
John has created about a dozen pieces on the theme of value, and he tells us why he finds the invention and history of money so fascinating. He speaks about the geology of materials, and how he takes this into account when he chooses what stone to work with.
The Sleeper and The Rose (2021) was inspired by a Greek piece. John discusses how we live in a time where Western culture is trying to come to terms with its history and its colonial past. He feels it is important to let go without forgetting.
John’s series on Sirens was inspired by Greek figures. Sometimes used as a memorial, sometimes to mark an event, and sometimes as a real person. John explains how in the Louvre everything was against the wall because it was considered a humiliation for an aristocrat to walk behind another person, and a sculpture was considered another person.
Born in Canada, John now shares a studio in Pietrasanta with his wife the sculptor Vanessa Paschakarnis, and a lively community of frogs.
Thanks to Gail Skoff for this collaboration and for the fantastic photographs of John.
John Greer finds art gives him an invaluable structure in life. Expressing himself in form is more important than a visual language.
Professor of sculpture for 26 years at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, John was the catalyst for the ‘Halifax Sculpture’ movement in the 1990s which was rooted in minimalism and conceptualism.
Inspiration for his sculpture often comes from Ancient Celtic stones and Greek sculpture and he likes the merging of cultural and natural history.
He discusses a number of projects he has created over the years, and Gail Skoff took photographs of some of his more recent works.
John has created about a dozen pieces on the theme of value, and he tells us why he finds the invention and history of money so fascinating. He speaks about the geology of materials, and how he takes this into account when he chooses what stone to work with.
The Sleeper and The Rose (2021) was inspired by a Greek piece. John discusses how we live in a time where Western culture is trying to come to terms with its history and its colonial past. He feels it is important to let go without forgetting.
John’s series on Sirens was inspired by Greek figures. Sometimes used as a memorial, sometimes to mark an event, and sometimes as a real person. John explains how in the Louvre everything was against the wall because it was considered a humiliation for an aristocrat to walk behind another person, and a sculpture was considered another person.
Born in Canada, John now shares a studio in Pietrasanta with his wife the sculptor Vanessa Paschakarnis, and a lively community of frogs.
Thanks to Gail Skoff for this collaboration and for the fantastic photographs of John.
A podcast where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose.
John Greer:
I think expressing yourself in form is more important than visual language. It's a different processing. Art has given me a structure of pieces that has given me a way back to go further. It's like you can't move forward unless you look back. It was an interview, and there was one question was rejected, or one answer was rejected from the committee when they put the book together.
John Greer:
What would you do if you didn't have art? The only difference between a crazy person and an artist is they have a constructive path, because you're both at the edge of time.
Sarah Monk:
Hi. This is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. Today, I'm meeting Canadian born John Greer, who was a professor of sculpture for twenty six years at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. John was the catalyst for the Halifax Movement in the nineteen nineties, which was rooted in minimalism and conceptualism. His inspiration often comes from ancient Celtic stones and Greek sculpture, and he likes the collusion between cultural and natural history.
Sarah Monk:
Californian photographer Gail Scoff took some great photographs of John at work, which you can find on our website. I met John at the studio which he shares with his wife, the sculptor Vanessa Paschakarnis on the edge of Pietrasanta. I asked John to introduce himself.
John Greer:
My name is John Sydney Greer, Irish extraction in Canada. British subject born abroad instead of my birth certificate.
Sarah Monk:
How do you identify? Do you identify as Canadian though very
John Greer:
much? Well, I love Italy. So, because I'm I'm interested in history. I'm interested in why humans have created history because our only way to move forward is looking backward, and I still believe in progress. And art has allowed me to try and make sense of the world I found myself in.
John Greer:
And I think that's that's that's the function of art is to destabilize the status quo. Because if a culture, gets too rigid, it'll break. And and I I don't think people understand, culture quite the same way as I do. I see culture as a construct and and it varies from culture to culture. I think there is crossover sometimes, but I think we confuse culture with reality.
John Greer:
I think reality is also a construct, and I think part of the function of art is to make people realize that reality isn't what we think it is. I mean, the reason there's wars is because both sides are right from that cultural perspective, and they'll kill each each other over something that's that's been put together, and they believe it as as reality. I don't think reality will ever know what that is because we only have glimpses of it. And I think when you get some kind of an epiphany, then you're then you're into some level of reality that goes beyond culture. And I think, I've had a few of those epiphanies and work has come out of it, and that's when I find that things are working.
John Greer:
It's like Matisse. They asked Matisse if he believed in god, and he said, only when I'm working. So I think that's a beautiful quote. Because I think, you know, in a way, work that transcends, from one culture to another becomes, bridges. And I think what's important in a personal body of work is that the bridges that connect one piece to another to create a body because a body of work is more important in the long run than individual pieces, because it's part of a voice.
John Greer:
I taught for a long time and a lot of students from the, say, ceramics department would want to take sculpture because it's three-dimensional. And and I would have to have a lot of dialogue what's the difference between craft and air. And, and I think there's a difference otherwise we wouldn't have two terms. I think craft enhance the enhances the day to day quality of your life. It's it's wonderful, but I think art allows you to die right and then come to terms with life.
John Greer:
So I think I think that's the main difference between the two. It's like, if I do something and if I like it and if it's working for me, I'll ask somebody else. And if it works for somebody else, then at least I'm not alone. And if it works for more people, then I'm on the right track. So I think that's how that's how language builds.
John Greer:
I think art is a language.
Sarah Monk:
That's terrific. What is this what is this bird thing going on? It's fantastic.
John Greer:
That's our friendly frog.
Sarah Monk:
Oh, it's a frog. Yeah. So I was gonna ask you about, the relationship with your students because I know you taught for what twenty six years?
John Greer:
Twenty seven years.
Sarah Monk:
Twenty seven years. Can you tell me a little about that and how it impacted you?
John Greer:
Yeah. I it was a wonderful opportunity. I mean, I never even graduated from high school and to work to be full professor, that's some maneuvering, because academia is like a a pool of barracudas. So, you have to be pretty strong and, tenacious. But the the thing I liked about teaching mostly was I wanted to find out what was relevant to fresh minds.
John Greer:
And so and try and give them an atmosphere in which they can express that openly. Where did you teach? I taught in Nova Scotia. It was a very important school on the it's a conceptual school. I also went to the school before.
John Greer:
It wasn't an important conceptual school. It was more like an arts and crafts school. I lasted two years and went on to Vancouver. First Montreal then Vancouver because I wanted to find out what was relevant across the whole country. I mean, when I was a kid, I never even knew art existed.
John Greer:
At that time in Canada, it was a sort of an embarrassment if your kids were interested in art.
Sarah Monk:
Where were you born and?
John Greer:
My grandmother lived in a place called Joggins where even early, Darwin and people like that were interested in Joggins because Joggins was a, hotbed of fossils. And so I would go there and collect fossils. And it was a coal mining place, so you couldn't have a fire on the beach without the beach possibly catching fire. And all the slag piles were burning, so I thought the earth was on fire about a foot down. So, but when you, you know, when people talk about these things, these things that were 250,000,000 years old, and you're trying as a little kid trying to understand that, was fascinating.
John Greer:
But it was a fantastic environment at my grandmother's. And then where I lived was an interesting place because it was the last base in Canada for troops going to Europe in the second World War. So the war didn't really end there until about 1955. So they're still blowing things up and, you know, get rid of all the the base. And so, you know, it was in being a curious kid, I would I would drag other kids.
John Greer:
Like, one time I found a wagon load of bombs. Like, they're only small yellow bombs, and they're beautiful. So I got my wagon and I followed it up, went through the village, and nobody come near me. And I couldn't understand because I want to show them what I found. And so when I got home, they they took my wagon from me.
John Greer:
But it was a very curious, place. There was an airplane in the backyard next door that was being dismantled so I could get, you know, window plexiglass and try and make things with that. And, even in before I knew anything about art even or, you know, other than bad art education in school, I would be involved in carving sculpture. I didn't know it was sculpture with chalk leftover chalk with compass point. So I wasn't paying much attention to lessons, but I was having a lot of fun.
Sarah Monk:
And how old were you when you did this?
John Greer:
All too old, like 15. Mhmm. Right.
Sarah Monk:
And your family were they artistic?
John Greer:
No. My my father was a, a druggist. He ran a drugstore, and we didn't have much money, but you don't know that when you're a kid because to a kid, everything is normal. Anything and everything. But my they didn't they wanted to know what to do with me when I got to be getting towards the end of schooling.
John Greer:
And I didn't have any ambition to do anything because there was no role models for me to to look at. And so they you know, my father somehow got me placed in a map drawing school, and I went to talk to the cartographers, and they all said, no. No. Don't do it. Don't do it.
John Greer:
Don't do it. So
Sarah Monk:
Why not?
John Greer:
Because they were just hunched over to us at that point. It was I don't know if it's more fun now or not. And then I had an uncle who was a producer in TV and so I said, you know, I love photographing. And he says, no. No.
John Greer:
Don't do it. Don't do it because you really don't it's not creative like you think it is. Somehow, I got funneled into this art school. I found out I wasn't alone. There was other people interested in the same kinds of things in a way.
John Greer:
And the principal of the school wouldn't let me study fine arts because he was a failed fine artist, and he thought I would just ruin my life. So I had to leave that school and went to Montreal. An interesting school. I studied, some sculpture and design and painting. And then I heard of an artist, Ray Kyoka.
John Greer:
He was Japanese abstracting in Canada. Interesting, brilliant man. And he taught at a different university, but he then he was going back to British Columbia. So I thought I would see what that was like, in terms of the art scene. And that was more interesting.
John Greer:
Since I graduated in 1967, fine finally from Montreal, but also from Vancouver School of Art, and then from then on, I've always had a studio making work and doing whatever I had to do to survive. This is a hundred jobs. So I did a piece.
Sarah Monk:
That's some sort of front argument.
John Greer:
Yeah. But competing with me. So I found myself looking at this poster, cocking my head to the side, and I thought of a mirror and I thought I look like a little dog. So I I made a mirror that said that. Read silently, I look like a little dog.
John Greer:
So when somebody looks in there, all of a sudden they have this kind of a sense of compassion. And I did a number of pieces where words physically the word put you in a certain position. Can
Sarah Monk:
you explain that?
John Greer:
I have a piece down near in a sculpture park near Rome. It looks like a pillow. It's a pillow size rock Guatemalan green marble and it's in a bamboo forest in Rome. And you walk into it and there's this pillow and there's a gold line in the middle with very fine writing on either side in Japanese and English. And you bend over to Rita and it says, the piece is called Humble Ending.
John Greer:
So as you bend over, it says, Sayonara. And you walk around the other side and it says Sayonara again. So things like that. And what's what's important for me is that work works up close as well as at a distance. And I will also wanna make work that anybody can find themselves in it.
John Greer:
Whatever you bring with it takes the work further. I had a show where it was called Tap Dance. It was four galvanized buckets with taps on the bottom, cheap brass taps, and they were filled with water and I made them leak a little bit. So you get this rhythm in your brain hears it as water torture or music. And so the guard of that museum, was going crazy, so he got a ladder and turned them all off.
John Greer:
Let me back up a little bit. There was I was doing a piece about four tons on the front of this museum, and this rookie cop comes by and see if I have a permit for a crane truck, and I didn't. And I talked him in to give me five minutes to unload this and get the truck out. So he stood there timing me, and I thought, what a Philistine. And so back to the the water being turned off.
John Greer:
So I got a call from the director of the museum to come and fix my piece. It wasn't working. So I go and it's torrential rain outside just like crazy, and I'm trying to make my buckets leak. So the irony is is entertaining. And there's a lot of thoughtful early pieces in that shop.
John Greer:
And so all of a sudden, in pieces in that show. And so all of a sudden, in walks this young rookie cop. He's getting out of the weather. He's got his raincoat on. He's got his radio blasting away, and he starts looking at the work.
John Greer:
And as he looks at one work to another, he turns his radio down. His posture is changing. And, like, about forty minutes later, he's still there. And he doesn't know who I am up the ladder, and I've been just watching him. And I go down, and I go up to him, and I say, what do you think of this stuff?
John Greer:
And he says, I didn't know there was art you had to think about. And I thought, wow. This is a surprise from from this guy. And so, you know, back up the ladder, and he spent another half hour there. And so a couple days later, I was talking to the director.
John Greer:
He said, isn't it funny? He came in with a number of other young police officers a few days after that. So I thought, wow. Wow. So I like when you can access people's curiosity.
John Greer:
I was in Carrara another time when there was a landslide started. I was at the bottom of the mountain and all of a sudden I heard one rock dislodge another rocks and other rocks. And when you're at the bottom, you wanna know where this is coming from. So I look and look and can't see it, but then it slows down and stops. And I thought, jeez.
John Greer:
That's really interesting because the mountain has moved. I know it has, but it's come to balance. It's come to this transitional balance, and that's the way ideas come into the human mind. They come in and they stir disturb things until they make sense in location in your matrix of your mind, and it's a temporary temporary position. So this temporal balance, I think, is a very interesting thing.
John Greer:
And I think that's what culture should be seen as this, not something solid, but a temporary structure. So changeable, creatable, destructible. But to do stone carving in nineteen sixties and seventies in North America was to be a fossil. Higher was Corten steel. And so I started seeing work come out of Italy in the art magazines around the same time as the Berlin Wall was being torn down.
John Greer:
And and I started seeing work that I didn't particularly like coming out of Italy. It was trying to relegate humans to godlike positions. And And I think the difference between Greek art and Roman art is is I think Greek art is the manifestation of the spirit in the in the material, and, the Roman art is trying to elevate humans to to the god position, generally speaking. So I came because I thought, how do you represent that cold fist with your fist inside? You know, the pacifist.
John Greer:
And so I came to do a piece called Sleeping Wills, which was I wanted to use different marbles, different colors to represent these these snake forms with the heads tucked in. Because a snake with its head tucked in is a defensive position certain snakes take. And so, and I think a human it's called sleeping wills because I think human willpower can raise its ugly head and can be destructive or beneficial. So depending on the intelligence and the humanity of of the consciousness that's raising the will. So I did these seven snakes, and you walk amongst them, spread out in the space.
John Greer:
And as you walk through, they visually uncoil. So you get this unsettling feeling, just because your your ability to navigate trajectory through through space. So I came and did that piece. And I was really encouraged to find out that you could be an artist here, and it wasn't an embarrassment. You know, I was in tears leaving because I had never experienced that before.
John Greer:
It's hard in Italy for an Italian contemporary artist because, they have so much baggage. Like it's being stuck with all your grandparents furniture. So you have to find out how to put that baggage down.
Sarah Monk:
Fantastic. I was actually gonna ask you if there was anything in particular you learned from the students.
John Greer:
I would teach in such a way that I would consider students peers. That you could help them on the track, you know, like an older peer. And I thought, you know, for me that was important. One interesting thing I fought to try and keep as long as possible, there was no grading system in the school. You either got credit or no credit.
John Greer:
So you didn't have to satisfy the instructor. So and I thought it was a much more open. He had twenty four hour access. And so the freshness of students' mind helped me keep my mind fresh. And to come up with ideas, like, I had some drawing classes where I had to teach, like, eight hours of drawing a day.
John Greer:
So how do you come up with interesting things to keep people engaged? And so it was and I ended up loving it. Came up with a lot of interesting things. And so there was that kind of, stimulation with young minds. Who wasn't saying that the only problem with young people is they want to try the impossible and succeed?
John Greer:
So I would that's what that's what kept me there.
Sarah Monk:
Should we talk about some of your work then?
John Greer:
Okay. We can start with the money work. There's one here.
Sarah Monk:
Oh, lovely.
John Greer:
Yeah. I was shortlisted for commission, and I wanted to do this piece. And I really liked the idea. I never got the commission, but it got me onto a different track about value because it was a commission where, it was government in private lending money to Canadian companies working internationally. And so it was in Ottawa.
John Greer:
And on a column, I want to do coins about three two to three feet based on antique coins falling out of the sky down to one on the bottom level that you could rub on your way to work for good luck, like the nose on the boar in Firenze. So this this piece here was a four ton rock. I was interested in China at this point because I think the invention of money and the history of money is very fascinating. I've done about a dozen money pieces or value pieces that refer to the money. This is a Wushu coin.
John Greer:
It went on for a thousand, a long time as a coin. This piece is called fuse because fuse has this, two possible meanings. It's either coming together or blowing apart like a dynamite. So I was interested in the idea of what money does. It either coalesces people or puts them in adversity.
John Greer:
So I used this travertine from Iran because it looks like it's old, so it looks like it's been buried. I I think the geology of material is interesting because marble and limestone were living materials at one point. In fact, they called them living stones.
Sarah Monk:
What what do you mean by that?
John Greer:
They were shellfish where magma wasn't. Magma is silicon based. So I often take that into account when I decided on a stone material, the geological foundation of it.
Sarah Monk:
That's great because I was gonna ask you, how do you choose the materials you work with?
John Greer:
Yeah. And I didn't know this was so nice to work, this travertine, because it looks like it's fragile, but it's not. And when you wash out the mud, the mud's been there for two million years also. The last money piece I did is seven cowhides stacked up. Like, when you go to Ikea and you see the cowhides, you pick them up, there's a nice weight to them, them.
John Greer:
The way they have hangover and so on. And then I was thinking, there's something really sensual about the Americans talk about $2, 5 bucks, and so on. The buck is actually a buckskin. So it was a form of currency and still referred to, but most people don't even know it. Right?
John Greer:
So I didn't know that. Yeah. And there's another piece, a brief history of money over there where the Chinese, first, their coins were like objects, like a a spade, a bridge, and, a sword. Those are the three I I chose. And I I enlarged them so I can relate them from one object to another.
John Greer:
When I use scale, I do it as, you know, my scale relating to the idea. And I think invention of money is almost up there with fire. Like, Alexander Alexander the Great couldn't have gone to Asia unless he had coins because you have 10,000 people in the March, you have to give them something. It so so I think, you know, when when they came up with coinage, it was a very big deal. It comes up in other pieces too.
John Greer:
But these pieces of stone are enlarged. They're called oracle bones in China. I've done a series of them. It was often the underbelly of a turtle or bones. What they would do, they would heat them with iron rods, and as they cracked, the oracle would foretell the future.
John Greer:
And it's the beginning of Chinese writing, really. There's, like, 3,000 symbols, and they know about half of them. So academics are now trying to look back to see what the the Chinese were looking ahead to see. So I find the meeting of minds really interesting, that that kind of directional thinking.
Sarah Monk:
That piece there, this one here and is also Oh,
John Greer:
that's a Greek piece. It's called The Sleeper and the Rose. And and we're living in an interesting time when Western culture is trying to come to terms with its history, the colonial past, and all those things have to do with trying to let go, but not but how do you let go and not forget? So, I think, you know, this this I think Western culture is falling asleep, but you don't wanna fall asleep. You wanna remember and learn from that.
John Greer:
So that's why it's so important, and that's based on, the head of that piece is based on a small model of a carotid in grease. It's like a cloud she's falling into here.
Sarah Monk:
So the sleeper and the rose
John Greer:
I've used the rose in a number of pieces, especially the rose bud, not the open rose. Because a rosebud, when you when you break it off and you hold it and it's heavy, it has a density, just before it gets incredibly light. So it's like when an idea comes into your mind and you wonder what and you struggle with that and all of a sudden it opens up. So it's an opening up. And the rose has been used cross culturally all around the world as this idea of consideration.
John Greer:
We can talk about the the sirens. It's a Korai, archaic Greek figure that was used to, sometimes as a memorial and sometimes American event and sometimes as a real person. See, I get off on tangents too.
Sarah Monk:
That's fine. I like the tangent.
John Greer:
The tangent in that is that you go to the Louvre and everything's against the wall. Now, most people people don't know why that is. The the reason that it is is was, a humiliation for an aristocrat to walk behind another person, and they considered the sculpture another person. And I find that really fascinating. And that's why noses were broken off the sculpture from one culture to another.
John Greer:
You defaced them. Like Shakespeare, you thumb your nose a knee, sir. I thumb my nose, sir, but not a knee, sir. That comes from that defacing. So those things are all in this piece.
John Greer:
It's a returning and a going out. I got interested in that with the word in Spanish because duende is that, like flamenco dancing where you get both happy and sad simultaneously. It's a richness. The sirens, first, were half human, half bird. So these I I use these sirens in various locations in public and private collections, a few, because it indicates for me the desire to go into the world.
John Greer:
You have your own choice. You can go in whatever direction you want. You have the ability to move where where where some things don't, you know. So I think the responsibility goes back to the to you. You you you you are your own self authority.
John Greer:
There's no other authority except your own self authority, really. You have to be prudent and watch other people's definition of authority. But really when it comes down to it, you return to the privacy of your own mind on your deathbed. Right? So you better have done things right.
John Greer:
I I received the Governor General's Award, the highest award in Canada for, commitment to a lifetime of art. There was an interview and there was one question was rejected or one answer was rejected from the committee when they put the book together. Together. What would you do if you didn't have art? And I said I'd probably commit suicide because I I would not have been able to make sense of things.
John Greer:
I couldn't reconcile. And art has allowed me to reconcile myself in place and in time, and, I find that incredibly valuable. Because I don't I can't think of any other way I could have done that. I'm almost crying. Right?
John Greer:
Well, being dyslexic was really hard because people assumed you were stupid, and I didn't think I was stupid. But, like, even in university, I didn't dare tell anybody I was dyslexic. So in order to write a memo, I'd have to spread out newspapers to find the word. I could use the word, but I couldn't spell it. I was insecure about spelling.
John Greer:
I mean, I've always been interested in language probably because it's been a difficult thing for me. And I think expressing yourself in form is more important than visual language. Mhmm. But I'm really interested in visual language too because it's a of this non ability to picture words.
Sarah Monk:
So so can you expand on, how art helped you process things?
John Greer:
Yeah. The only difference between a crazy person and an artist is they have a constructive path. Because you're both at the edge of at the edge of time. And so art has given me a structure of pieces that has given me a way back to go further. And I think that that's has allowed me to grow because it also has it's like you can't move forward unless you look back, the same thing.
John Greer:
That's why I think it's important to keep aware of where your works are so the body of work is so important, not the individual pieces as much as the body. Because the body of work is is the voice. A culture without a voice isn't a culture at all.
Sarah Monk:
So thanks to John. You can see his work on his website, artist John Greer dot com, or on Instagram at artist John greer. Thanks to Gail Scoff, whose photographs of John can be seen on our website, materiallyspeaking.com, and on Instagram. You can also check out Gail's work on her website, gailscoff.com, and of course on Instagram, at scoff up close. Thanks for listening, and if you're enjoying Materially Speaking, please subscribe to subscribe to our newsletter on our website so we can let you know when the next episode goes live.