Di-d (Dad) Artist in Residence Alumni Exhibition: Kendall Sweeney

From July-August of 2024 Kendall Sweeney spent three weeks at Union House Arts as a visiting artist drawing and collecting wishing stones. Di-d (Dad) is a culmination of these drawings, their tradition, and significance to Sweeney’s childhood memories with her father, Angus Sweeney. 

Wishing stones are beach rocks formed through millions of years of sediment, pressure and erosion with an unbroken white ring along their surface. Varied folkloric tales share record that these rocks have the ability to grant its finder a wish by tracing their fingers around the rock’s ring, making their wish, and tossing the stone back into the ocean, or by passing it onto a loved one to fulfill the request. The tradition changes depending on geographic location and ancestry, but the heart of the practice lies in small personal ritual and desire. Sweeney draws on this sentiment when illustrating her large photo-realism portraits of wishing stones, spending hours pouring over their fine details with graphite pencils and q-tips. Sweeney has spent years collecting wishing stones and many of them represent precious items that have become hard to part with due to their personal connotations and labour-intensive portraiture. By holding onto these stones, Sweeney has effectively stalled their wish-giving abilities and instead displays them as a means of preserving the fading memories of her Dad.

This series began in 2022 as a way to express unspoken apologies to her Dad (phonetically Di-d) for their disjointed relationship that has been characterized by separation and tethered to childhood days of collecting wishing stones on the rocky beaches of Bell Island. Kendall and Angus have always lived in two separate places. Kendall in town (or St. John’s) and Angus on the Island (or Bell Island). Forming a typical  father/daughter relationship through parental separation and physical distance isn’t easy; their lives were always separate but never separated. Now, wishing stones flood Sweeney’s childhood memories with her Dad as they often tossed, skipped, and collected these stones while waiting for the ferry during their bi-weekend visits. In Sweeney’s mind wherever her dad was, a wishing stone followed.

During her time in residence, Kendall would often remark on the similarities shared between Bell Island and the Bonavista Peninsula, finding many coincidental connections to her Dad starting with Ethan Murphy’s piece, Positive Attitude; a large printed photo of Bell Island’s former waterhouse that resides framed and unhung in the upstairs hallway of UHA from our inaugural exhibition, Labour Laws. For Kendall, day trips across the peninsula frequently brought up memories regarding the end visits with her Dad and their wait for the ferry to go back to town to her Mom (Cynthia) and Step-Dad (Terry), back to her separate life. These small moments during her time with us drew the bigger picture of what wishing stones symbolized in Sweeney’s practice; not just a wish but a connection, a feeling, and a close reminder of someone who may feel quite far away. 

Aside from her connection to wishing stones, Sweeney effectively manages to illustrate a portrait of islandness in the contexts of the North Atlantic. Rocky shorelines compose this province’s landscape and many residents and visitors alike have bent down during a walk on the beach to pick up a rock that caught their attention. These stones have the powerful ability to connect us. For some, they are a reminder of a person or a place, a shared experience, and for others they offer a lifetime of experience in holding, and sometimes giving us, some of our most precious desires.

– Bethany MacKenzie