Mosaics that dot Ashcroft just the latest treasures in the charming and out-of-the-way Thompson River Valley village
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 18:20:07 +0000
“It gets so hot, Old Doc Sanson used to say, there was just a piece of brown paper between Ashcroft and hell.”
— display inside the Ashcroft Museum
ASHCROFT — Marina Papais doesn’t care how high the thermometer climbs, she loves it.
Baking hot and dry, just as her favourite artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, experienced in the New Mexico desert. It’s what drew Papais to this lovely and historic village in the Thompson River Valley, hidden from main highways and, in places, time.
“I didn’t want to go to a desert in the States, so this … there is a 100-mile corridor that is actually a desert,” Papais, originally from Vancouver, said.
Before retirement her specialty as a stained glass artist was architectural glass in churches, civic buildings, etc. Her current mission, along with her husband Daniel Collett, a retired architect from Oliver via Kamloops who helps out on her projects, is to cover Ashcroft in high-quality pieces of glass art.
“Tourism has gone up 50 per cent (since her glass mosaics began appearing around town five years ago),” she said.
“There are 40 major installations with 164 pieces, and we recently had tourist from France and from Germany come just to see the mosaics.”
Painters Kazuhiko Nagaki of Ashcroft’s sister city Bifuka, Japan (left) and Royce Josephson, with glass-mosaic artist Marina Papais, who blended works of art by each man into a mural she calls Sister City Synergy. (Gord McIntyre photo)
The village is full of stories.
Tami Pinch, who owns the River Inn Restaurant where a great meal and glass of wine comes in just under $20, has a wonderful one of being raised as a foster child and how that sparked a drive to own her own business someday.
While Pinch and I are chatting at a windowside table with the Thompson River raging past just meters away, John Kidder comes in with one of his daughters and his son-in-law.
The 71-year-old Kidder, a hops farmer and jack of all trades who founded the B.C. Green Party in 1983, married Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May on Earth Day in April.
A lifelong federal Liberal until Justin Trudeau came out in favour of the Trans Mountain pipeline, he is running for the Greens in the coming federal election.
Kidder’s family has been around Ashcroft since the 1930s, and he’s a fascinating story on his own, but he persuaded me to focus elsewhere and tour the town’s mosaics. It was he who gave me Papais’ number, urging me to call her in the morning.
I would, but first I spent 30 minutes in the Ashcroft Museum, across the street from the old Ashcroft Opera House and one of the best small-town museums I’ve seen.
There’s even a polo stick.
“Yes, they played polo,” curator Kathy Paulos said. “Walhachin (then known as Canada’s Camelot, now a ghost town) would win at polo and tennis, then they’d come here and Ashcroft would win at hockey and curling.”
When I did phone Papais, the timing was just right.
The first mural of hers I came across is called Sister City Synergy, in honour of Ashcroft’s Japanese twin city Bifuka. It’s a mosaic blending two paintings, by Royden Josephson who grew up in Manitoba and now lives in Ashcroft, and Kazuhiko Nagaki, a Japanese artist who painted the Japanese mural at Heritage Park on Ashcroft’s Railway Avenue.
The idea to merge the two artists’ visions came to her in a dream, Papais said, and she invited me to her studio at the Hub, an elementary school that also houses a gym, photo studio and dance classes. Both Josephson and Nagaki happened to be there.
Nagaki, as well as Japanese consulate general Takashi Hatori, was in town for a ceremony a day earlier for the unveiling of three projects to honour interned Japanese Canadians: One, titled Kan Jo on the side of the IDA pharmacy, translates as “forgiveness without resentment”; another is at the Harmony Bell Tower at the lovely little Heritage Park, where four mosaics are dedicated to the four peoples of Ashcroft’s history: Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese and European settlers.
(The Chinese, there to build the railway and later farm the area’s famous potatoes and tomatoes, at one time outnumbered the Europeans; the Nlaka’pamux, of course, were there long before the others.)
“We want to work all the community voices, to have all their voices be heard,” Papais said. “We have four prevalent communities in this town, and they all need a voice.
“Through the art, we have been giving them a voice.”
Papais and Collett do not take money for their works.
“It’s our way to give back to the community,” Collett said. “We’re retired and we don’t need the money.”
Glass mosaic by Marina Papais of a painting by A.Y. Jackson called Ashcroft. The founding member of the Group of Seven spent six weeks sketching in Kamloops, Barkerville and Ashcroft in the fall of 1945. (Gord McIntyre photo)
Ashcroft Opera House, erected in 1889.
John Bundus blacksmith and welding shop, which only closed recently after being run by the family for 83 years in Ashcroft.
Ashcroft Museum in the 1917 Dominion Building, which originally housed the village post office. (Gord McIntyre photo)
Butter churn and cobber’s bench, Ashcroft Museum. (Gord McIntyre photo)
A 24-year-old Princess Elizabeth on a 1950 lunch box, two years before she became queen. (Gord McIntyre photo)
Chinese laundry, Ashcroft Museum. (Gord McIntyre photo)
The Chinese Cemetery in Ashcroft, developed early last century by the Canadian Pacific Railway with 49 graves, had fallen into disrepair by 2005 and was restored by volunteers in town. Glass artist Marina Papais made a Dragon mosaic and Koi bench, and she and her partner Daniel Collett designed the altar, dedicated to the memory of the Chinese workers who helped build the CPR in B.C. (Gord McIntyre photo)
The Chinese Cemetery in Ashcroft, developed early last century by the Canadian Pacific Railway with 49 graves, had fallen into disrepair by 2005 and was restored by volunteers in town. Glass artist Marina Papais made a Dragon mosaic and Koi bench, and she and her partner Daniel Collett designed the altar, dedicated to the memory of the Chinese workers who helped build the CPR in B.C. (Gord McIntyre photo)