A tiny fairy world was hidden in an Edmonton gallery during lockdown. Now, it's yours to explore

In the spring of 2021, Tammy Salzl grew an enchanted forest inside the Main Gallery at Harcourt House, an artist-run centre in Edmonton's Oliver neighbourhood. Salzl, a local artist perhaps best known for her painting, was installing an all-new project, a show she'd developed as a sort of escapist experience. It was an immersive exhibition — one involving a generative six-channel soundtrack, painted backdrops and myriad miniature landscapes where sprites and other sculpted critters were waiting to be discovered. But irony of ironies, hardly anyone actually saw it in person.

COVID restrictions kept the gallery from launching the exhibition IRL. And so, Salzl's show — Emerald Queendom — remained hidden away for the duration of its scheduled run.

"There was no access. Zero," says Salzl, speaking with CBC Arts from Edmonton, where she teaches painting at the University of Alberta. "Just a few close friends and artworld people saw it. Maybe 20 people — maybe." But that's about to change.

Emerald Queendom has returned to Harcourt House, and this time it's open to the public. Through Feb. 17, visitors can go on a fairy hunt. Just beware: Salzl's creations are as alluring as they are grotesque, existing on the borders of reality and fantasy, animal and mineral. And in the time that's passed since the show's previously scheduled debut, Salzl's continued to expand Emerald Queendom's universe, sculpting further additions to the realm. The exact future of the project remains unwritten, but for now, Salzl has plenty to share about the origins of Emerald Queendom. We reached her by phone.

CBC Arts: How was the opening? It's remarkable you've had the chance to finally open the show to the public.

Tammy Salzl: Yeah, yeah. It was great. And in person, people were coming up and asking questions, more so than any other show I've ever had. 

What did they want to know?

There was a lot of, "How did you do that?" I kind of danced around my eco anxiety in my artist's statement, and so I had some direct questions about that — and questions about the sound. People were just much more curious.

I want to know about the origins of this project. How did this all start?

COVID had a lot to do with it. We were all sort of ensconced in our house worlds, right? And I'd been playing with polymer clay and making these little things. They were really fun to make, but I never thought that they would actually be art-world ready. (laughs)

Why were you playing with clay in the first place? Is it something you'd worked with before?

I had done a residency in Norway in 2019, and I made a film out there. I had made one little creature as a prop in the film, and so I had this leftover clay sitting around. I just, you know, picked it up and started playing with it at home and made another little creature. 

I was also spending a lot of time [outdoors]. Edmonton has an amazing ravine system: there's deer down there and beavers and porcupines and owls, and it's literally a five-minute walk from my house. So I was spending a lot of time down there during COVID, and I started remembering how when I was a kid on my aunt's farm — walking through the countryside when we would visit my country cousins — I would always imagine fairy creatures in these secret worlds. It reminded me of that, and so it sort of went from there. 

So those first creatures you made: were they fairies, or what form did they take?

I guess they were my interpretation of fairies. It was meant to be a little flower fairy creature that you would see in the woodland forest. It's sort of a mixture of my knowledge of fairies — everything from Disney to the Brothers Grimm to fairies in other cultures. 

She doesn't have wings. She's cute, but weird. I wanted them to be cute and gross. They've got these bloated sort of Buddha bellies that are meant to represent abundance, and they're doing naughty things and they're doing gross things, but they're also beautiful — sort of like humans. 

After I built two little creatures, I was having more fun than I've ever had making, and it's actually changed the way I make to this day. Like, it shouldn't be such a psychological slog; I shouldn't be worrying so much about how something is going to be read.

I really had a lot of fun, and so now I'm taking that into everything that I do. If I'm not having fun, I'm stopping. Do something else! 

At what point did you decide to build a whole universe? 

So, that's what happens when artists get a green light. (laughs)

I had been given a show at Harcourt House — for different work, actually. Because of COVID, things were getting pushed back, so I went to them and said I was making these fairies, and they were like, "Write us a proposal."

I couldn't just put them on plinths; they're too small. So I thought I'd make little worlds, and it just snowballed from there. 

My original proposal was not even a quarter of what I ended up doing. It went from being, "I'm going to build a world on a six-foot table" to "I'm going to have five tables, because I've got that many fairies." And this world needs a pond! And video! (Video was something I had been doing in my installation work already, so that was an easy leap for me.)

And then I became obsessed with it really being a world within a world. I knew that I needed to really encompass the viewers. I decided to cover the walls of the entire gallery in a forest. And then, of course, there's the sound. I approached [frequent collaborator, Edmonton composer] Greg Mulyk and said, "We need to make this really immersive."

The world of Emerald Queendom: is it meant to be our universe or somewhere else entirely? What can you tell me about the place?

I try to have hope for our future, so I guess it could be a possible post-human future — a fantasy future of creatures who are human-like and represent the possibility of what it would be like to live in kinship with the world around us, where we're not consuming it or destroying it. It's sort of escapism, but it also hopefully harkens to the realities that we're facing. 

It's interesting to me that you describe it as a world where we're not consuming or destroying, because looking at pictures of the exhibition, a lot of the scenes are ambiguous: are these fairies doing something nurturing, or are they a destructive force? Like the photo of a fairy holding a broken egg. I'm not sure if …

Did she raid that bird's nest and is she eating the eggs? Of course she is. Because life eats life, right? 

There's another one where you can't tell if she's cradling a wasp or if she's about to eat it. Yeah. They're meant to come off that way. They're not meant to be Disney-esque, fun, enchanting fairies — they really relate to life as it sort of is. It's unpredictable and yet it's magical.

You mentioned you were getting a lot of questions at the opening about your climate anxiety. Can you tell me about that? What is it that you're anxious about and how did you address it in the piece?

My eco anxiety, I suppose, is probably in everything that I do — my concerns for the planet and climate change and how we're going to bring ourselves back from the brink.

10 or 15 years ago, it wasn't on people's lips, and I often felt alone in this anxiety. But now, I feel like people are aware; we just need to act. I used to be much more heavy-hitting with my paintings, and now I'm trying to find joy and hope. But obviously, that anxiety is still in there. 

Joy and hope — you mentioned earlier that making clay figures was a lot of fun. Is that why you chose to tell this story with miniatures? Is that what made miniatures the right format for this project? 

Yeah. I mean, it's the little kid in me, right? Like, the little girl who loves dollhouses and little dolls and little animals. You can anthropomorphize little things, and give them characters. They're animals and flowers, but not. They're these hybrid things. 

And just the joy in making them! Once their little faces come in, they are more alive to me than anything else I've ever made. I've had conversations with them in the studio. I come in and I'm like, "Hi friends!" 

I didn't want to create a world that was so heavy about the possibilities of where humanity could be going. I really wanted to build a world with them where they could thrive — that was beautiful and immersive and joyful. They're childlike, but they also address a lot of adult truths like how life is overshadowed by death and there's beauty and the grotesque in being human. They walk this line. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Tammy Salzl. Emerald Queendom. Harcourt House, Edmonton. To Feb. 17. www.harcourthouse.ab.ca