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A dual exhibition at the 210 Gallery in the Exchange District is bringing two artists together to explore resilience and connection to nature through their respective mediums.
Joy of Revival by Sylke van Niekerk and Evolving Balance/Disjointed by Derrick Rachul each examine through painting and woodcarving, respectively. The natural way in which his medium lends itself to conversations around climate resiliency are not lost on the Morden woodworker.
“If you take time to notice things, you notice that nature rarely moves in a straight line,” he says. “You’ll look at different trees and throughout their life – maybe there was a storm, there was something that knocked them over – they straighten up, but there’s curves, there’s bends. When I started working with wood, that became very obvious.”
Rachul lets those curves and bends guide his practice, following the grain of the wood to create the sculptures that eventually became a part of Evolving Balance/Disjointed. It is the latest in a series of interactions that Rachul has had with trees over the course of his life, first as a tree planter and then as a bush pilot and first responder in northern Ontario.
“There’s so many times when I would hold a piece of firewood or something that we’ve reclaimed to use as firewood,” Rachul says, “and I jus thought there’s something more to this.”
The resiliency that’s depicted in Evolving Balance/Disjointed speaks even more poignantly in 2025, one of the most devastating years for forest fires in Manitoba’s history. While Rachul acknowledges the scale of the destruction, his years of living amongst the trees also give him perspective. “To see a forest come back where you’ve seen one year where it’s charred devastation and it looks devastating – and it can be very thorough sometimes – but then you see a year or two later the way it starts to come back and how quick it’ll green up, that shocked me the first time that I’d seen that,” he says.
Given this view, Rachul hopes that his exhibit can serve as a message of hope in the face of destruction. “When those pieces were made deliberately out of alignment... using these pieces of wood that often were laying in the woods, discarded, forgotten about, maybe a layer of rot on top of them... for me, it was just trying to find the strength that was under that.”
Evolving Balance/Disjointed, alongside Joy of Revival, is on display at the 210 Gallery on Princess Street until August 28. Viewers can check out the gallery’s website for hours and more information.