B.Fat is the message and the pseudonym.听 Be all you can be. Be big and full and share that fullness of love and inclusion with every thing and every being.
I sit in a modest tidy home with B.Fat, a performance artist who lives in Greater Victoria who lives like a king. 听B.Fat is a pseudonym and a statement about being full of joy and love and expressing that fatness. B. Fat says that 'Art making is no longer about producing something, it is about being a certain way.鈥� 听That certain way involves mindfulness, respect, dedication and connection to nature. His inspirations include the writings of Star Hawk and the Dalai Lama.听 Near the end of the interview he states, "Everything has consciousness. 听To think that I am different is egotistical."
听His Art, is definitely not egotistical.听 He doesn鈥檛 sell it or take credit for it.听 He creates it for the good of the world without asking anything in return but the pleasure and the learning the creating offers.听 To create his art B.Fat moves through the woods of Greater Victoria creating temporary sculptural installations. What these sculptures look like is difficult to describe and yet so simple and innocent that it is easy to understand. 听Daily he sculpts with things he finds in the woods around Victoria. Placing and replacing natural and human objects to create connections between elements of nature and man. 听He describes his practice as "playing with nature, in real time."
When he finds a cache left by a human he documents it and leaves it for two years before he uses any of the contents in his artworks, 'in case the owners return'. 鈥淗owever鈥�, he remarks, 鈥渋t takes only 2 days for the woods to claim an unguarded cache. The raccoons, squirrels, rats and ravens make short work of plastic coverings and rain is relentless in seeking entry鈥�. 听These are caches left by international students, labourers, people recently homeless, or those in times of transition. When deconstructed they reveal lives that were full of hope of returning to collect these precious belonging and yet life did not turn out that way. Perhaps they did not return, or perhaps the woods had changed so much they couldn鈥檛 find them. B.Fat mentions an incident in which the cache was covered with trees that fell and quickly disappeared into the new growth. 鈥淭hey became the history of the woods then. Part of the story of the forest.鈥� These caches take B.Fat back to memories of his first career as a Social Worker engaged with the 鈥榤ost unreachable鈥� of adults in the city of Toronto.听 Eventually he was unable to escape burnout even though art making and painting in particular allowed him to express the struggles in his work delaying burnout for a number of years. He left social work and Toronto.听 The unreachable people were very special to his spiritual journey and continue to travel with him in his artwork.听听
B.Fat鈥檚 story includes illness, burnout, surprising new love and new beginnings, travel and a lifetime of questing for the divine. His practice is a devotion and a prayer for the earth that is not limited to sentient beings. He is grateful to be living like a King in this country with wealth of spirit and belongings not found in many places on earth.听
"Many of the things we fear about life on this planet are not realistic. 听In reality life is so much more powerful than we know." - BFat
Joanne Thomson听is a visual artist living in Victoria BC.听 She teaches a course about Art-making as a Spiritual Practice as well as courses in painting and drawing. Her works can be seen on-line听补迟听听听and听.听
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