Meet the People in our Neighbourhood
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Tacha Reed, August 27th, 2020 |
Olwynn Hughes: Alright, first of all, what is your name?
Tacha Reed: Tacha Reed
OH: All right. What year were you born in?
TR: 1978
OH: So what is your connection with Avondale?
TR: I'm currently the facility manager, but my first introduction probably happened a year or so after I moved into the area. Bryan (Woodworth) and I often on weekends would go on road trips and after a year or two we kind of knew all the main routes, so we started taking random little off turns. So one day we decided to cross the bridge by the Tidal Bore Market and took a left there on Avondale Road, and instantly I was like - wow, where are we? The cows in the field and the orchards… and then all of a sudden you come upon Sherman Hines’ house and I remember going - where are we, what is this place? As we came around the corner and saw the sign for Avondale I was like - it even has the prettiest name! Then we got to a fork in the road. So we chose to go left because we saw the sign for the community orchard and when we got to the top of the hill I started telling Bryan to slow down as we were passing the Mounce mansions. As we came out at the bottom of the hill and saw the wharf we couldn't believe that this was so close to our home and we lived without it for so long. It became a place that we could go on our drives. A few years later, after I opened Flying Cloud Boutique, I had been advertising quite a bit in What's Going On!, which was a little community paper that was run by Heather Deveaux, so she approached me about taking over the gift shop in the museum.
At that point I had my little shop open for two years. It was (located) in a 1955 airstream (camper) that we converted into a shop on wheels and it sold art made locally. It (the gift shop) seemed like a pretty good fit for me, so I just brought all of my artists with me. I was here for probably about three weeks and I realized that the main reason that people were coming through the front door was they were interested in the cafe. At that point the cafe hadn’t been open for about three years from what I know, so I decided to come up with a really small, simple menu and I started running the cafe. Then the next year we applied for funding for a Creative Community Collaboration, and that's when the arts society became a partner and we started the art programming. We brought back Artisans in Action and started the Open Studio days, which we still have now. The ladies will be here tomorrow, on Thursday. We actually hosted an Artist in Residents that first year, which is something that we're hoping to do again in the future. So yeah, that was kind of how I came to be here.
OH - All right. So what kind of pulled you to wanting to be more involved with the work that's being done here.
TR - Personally, I've always... like my life goal, I’ve seen myself being involved in kind of like a community art center, a collaborative studio space. That's why I started Flying Cloud Boutique, because I knew it was going to take me a long time to meet all those people and form those relationships to do the big picture project, and what would be the easiest way to make those connections... so we’ll have some kind of a gift shop... like meet the artists first and then build the relationships. So it was actually the word gift shop that really drew me in like, oh, that's the magic word. Maybe you know, this place could someday be what I've envisioned, and eight years later it is evolving and getting closer and closer to that. So I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.
OH - All right, so you deal a lot with the river and a lot of your art has to do with the river. Why do you think it's important for people to see artwork of the river?
TR - That's interesting. Part of the way that my work involves around the river... how do I explain this… I think for me the river’s always kind of played a part in my life because I was originally born in the valley, but then we moved to the city when I was little, so all my summers would be spent in Middleton, in that area, so I would go back and forth quite constantly throughout my childhood growing up. Passing Windsor and the causeway, I was always fascinated by the water there and how sometimes you would go by and it would just be completely sand and sometimes it would be full of water. Probably when I was a teenager was when I first started to notice the grass appearing on the salt marsh there and as soon as I saw the grass it kind of clicked in my head that oh, this is really starting to change and then I became very aware, so every time I drove by the river I paid attention to what was going on there. So to end up working here many years later, especially with the job being seasonal, I'm not here in the winter, so when I come back six months later, I really notice the difference. The differences that have taken place in the environment. Like one year I came back and the whole shoreline across the river had just collapsed into the ocean. I started to become very aware of the salt marshes surrounding the river here and the shifting sandbars and watching them season-by-season get larger and larger and it clicked in that if something wasn't done about the causeway, and changed to allow the water to flow through again, this was just going to keep on growing and eventually that salt marsh was going to extend all the way from Windsor to potentially, if given the time, all the way to Hantsport, and that to me was a little alarming. I mean, it's nature doing what nature does, making the most of a bad situation, a bad situation being the causeway completely blocking the natural flow of the river. I felt that if I could help get all my thoughts and feelings out in wool and fibers, especially doing the map series, showing the changes to the river every 10 years over the last century, I thought maybe this will help other people come to see it the same way I do. I think a lot of people just take it for granted and don't really pay attention to it. I think especially in Windsor, they don't have the same connection that we do out here because the causeway is literally a giant fortress wall and they don't see the tide changing every day. They just see the false lake, which you know upon first glance looks quite nice, but the reality is it doesn't really support life and it is man-made and in my opinion, and many others, it was a mistake. I'd love to see that corrected and I will continue making art about it until things are resolved or changed, which seems to be happening at the moment.
OH - So, is there something you want to investigate further here?
TR - I think when I first became a part of this society I found that although the museum was laid out really well, and they had a lot of information, it only represented a very, very small chapter in time, where it was primarily devoted to the wooden shipbuilding, which makes perfect sense because this was the site of a shipyard at one point in time, but the reality is many other cultures have also been here over the years. Before the English took (the land) away from the Acadians they had built a really great relationship with the Mi’kmaq, and the Mi’kmaq would come and camp here every year for hunting and fishing. So my goal for the last five or six years has been to try and better tell the stories of all the people that have lived here throughout time. Last year, with a great deal of work from Carolyn van Gurp, we launched Stewards of the Avon River, which showcases the Mi’kmaq, the Acadians, African Nova Scotians and the Planters. It felt so good to kind of see that come full circle and now our goals are to continue on with that and continue telling the stories. Also for me, my job has always been a bit of a treasure hunter. Not being from here I've had to kind of put together the pieces of the history of Avondale and I've gotten to know quite a few people from the community, but there's still so many people we don't know, so this project that we worked on this summer (Meet the People in our Neighbourhood), I think it’s really, really important and I feel like it could go on forever. We need to talk to everybody, especially the older generation. If we don't get their stories then that oral history will just disappear into the ether. I think it's really, really important that we gather that information while we can.
OH - Okay do you think that like some of the history has kind of already been lost? Do you think that we'll be able to, you know, discover more and more, or like what do you think is going to happen with this?
TR - What I’m finding right now, like I said, I think of it as a treasure hunt and with each conversation that you’ve had so far there's always at least one little nugget that is worth exploring further. So yes, there's a lot of information that's been lost and there's no way to gather that now, but I think as long as we can do our best going forward to collect these stories and dig deeper and continue on, I think there's a lot of detail that we can still find out.
OH - So, the board now has 15 members I believe, so is that the first time that it has had that many members, that you’ve been here?
TR - Since I’ve been involved it’s definitely the largest board, we usually sit at around eight, so it's going to be interesting to have that many people involved. I think everybody brings something a little different. There's a number of people that have returned and have been involved in the past. Maybe not necessarily on the board, but for instance Richard Armstrong, who was part of the boat building school, so I'm interested to talk to him because that's a big chunk of our history that I'm not so versed in. Also both he and Sarah Beanlands know a great deal of information on the Acadians and the local history relating to that. So I think between all the different people and skills it's going to be really great for us and allow us to grow faster than we could with just having a board of seven or eight, you know, many hands lighten the load.
OH - Why do you think there is more interest in being on the board and being involved, especially with people that have just moved here?
TR - I think part of it is we've just been so engaged with the community in the last few years that it's allowed people to kind of come out of the woodwork and feel comfortable contributing. It's because we have this nice cozy place that people can come either for a barbecue on Friday night, or the artists come and hang out Thursday afternoons, or the different festivals. It's just allowed us to connect with a lot more people than we were in the past when the cafe wasn't open and when we didn't have as much to offer. I feel like we have a lot more to offer and because of that we're constantly bringing more people in to enjoy our community.
OH - All right. So what do you hope to see in Avondale and the surrounding area and the future?
TR - I would love to see more entrepreneurs, which I think thanks to covid-19, is happening automatically. We just have no choice but to kind of make the most of it and think locally, and because of that there's going to be lots of new businesses popping up. I feel like a lot of the local businesses are really trying hard to work together right now. Like we all have the same goals and I want to see that continue on, just a giant web of connections between all of us, where we all scratch each other's back and try to help each other as much as we can.
OH - What do you see your contribution being in the future?
TR - I would like to pivot a bit more to being solely directed towards the arts and culture side. Now that we have Carolyn and her team helping out with the curative and the heritage side of things I want to really focus on my strengths. I wear many hats but my favorite is that of the artist and sometimes I get spread a little too thin, but now with so many other people helping I'd like to really focus on that area and hopefully other people will come in to fill in some of the gaps.
OH - What do you love about Avondale?
TR - What do I love about Avondale, just about everything! We considered moving here, but I realize part of my, or one of my favorite things about Avondale is actually the drive to Avondale every day. I feel like if I lived here we would be more likely to take everything for granted. So as a slight outsider I feel like I really, really appreciate every moment that I spend here and yeah, it's just an amazing place really. It's rare that you can experience throughout the day a tide coming in and creeping right up to the edge of the shore and then many hours later completely receding and seeing the ocean floor, like to me that's just a magical experience and I'm very grateful that I get to experience that on a regular basis.
Tacha Reed: Tacha Reed
OH: All right. What year were you born in?
TR: 1978
OH: So what is your connection with Avondale?
TR: I'm currently the facility manager, but my first introduction probably happened a year or so after I moved into the area. Bryan (Woodworth) and I often on weekends would go on road trips and after a year or two we kind of knew all the main routes, so we started taking random little off turns. So one day we decided to cross the bridge by the Tidal Bore Market and took a left there on Avondale Road, and instantly I was like - wow, where are we? The cows in the field and the orchards… and then all of a sudden you come upon Sherman Hines’ house and I remember going - where are we, what is this place? As we came around the corner and saw the sign for Avondale I was like - it even has the prettiest name! Then we got to a fork in the road. So we chose to go left because we saw the sign for the community orchard and when we got to the top of the hill I started telling Bryan to slow down as we were passing the Mounce mansions. As we came out at the bottom of the hill and saw the wharf we couldn't believe that this was so close to our home and we lived without it for so long. It became a place that we could go on our drives. A few years later, after I opened Flying Cloud Boutique, I had been advertising quite a bit in What's Going On!, which was a little community paper that was run by Heather Deveaux, so she approached me about taking over the gift shop in the museum.
At that point I had my little shop open for two years. It was (located) in a 1955 airstream (camper) that we converted into a shop on wheels and it sold art made locally. It (the gift shop) seemed like a pretty good fit for me, so I just brought all of my artists with me. I was here for probably about three weeks and I realized that the main reason that people were coming through the front door was they were interested in the cafe. At that point the cafe hadn’t been open for about three years from what I know, so I decided to come up with a really small, simple menu and I started running the cafe. Then the next year we applied for funding for a Creative Community Collaboration, and that's when the arts society became a partner and we started the art programming. We brought back Artisans in Action and started the Open Studio days, which we still have now. The ladies will be here tomorrow, on Thursday. We actually hosted an Artist in Residents that first year, which is something that we're hoping to do again in the future. So yeah, that was kind of how I came to be here.
OH - All right. So what kind of pulled you to wanting to be more involved with the work that's being done here.
TR - Personally, I've always... like my life goal, I’ve seen myself being involved in kind of like a community art center, a collaborative studio space. That's why I started Flying Cloud Boutique, because I knew it was going to take me a long time to meet all those people and form those relationships to do the big picture project, and what would be the easiest way to make those connections... so we’ll have some kind of a gift shop... like meet the artists first and then build the relationships. So it was actually the word gift shop that really drew me in like, oh, that's the magic word. Maybe you know, this place could someday be what I've envisioned, and eight years later it is evolving and getting closer and closer to that. So I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.
OH - All right, so you deal a lot with the river and a lot of your art has to do with the river. Why do you think it's important for people to see artwork of the river?
TR - That's interesting. Part of the way that my work involves around the river... how do I explain this… I think for me the river’s always kind of played a part in my life because I was originally born in the valley, but then we moved to the city when I was little, so all my summers would be spent in Middleton, in that area, so I would go back and forth quite constantly throughout my childhood growing up. Passing Windsor and the causeway, I was always fascinated by the water there and how sometimes you would go by and it would just be completely sand and sometimes it would be full of water. Probably when I was a teenager was when I first started to notice the grass appearing on the salt marsh there and as soon as I saw the grass it kind of clicked in my head that oh, this is really starting to change and then I became very aware, so every time I drove by the river I paid attention to what was going on there. So to end up working here many years later, especially with the job being seasonal, I'm not here in the winter, so when I come back six months later, I really notice the difference. The differences that have taken place in the environment. Like one year I came back and the whole shoreline across the river had just collapsed into the ocean. I started to become very aware of the salt marshes surrounding the river here and the shifting sandbars and watching them season-by-season get larger and larger and it clicked in that if something wasn't done about the causeway, and changed to allow the water to flow through again, this was just going to keep on growing and eventually that salt marsh was going to extend all the way from Windsor to potentially, if given the time, all the way to Hantsport, and that to me was a little alarming. I mean, it's nature doing what nature does, making the most of a bad situation, a bad situation being the causeway completely blocking the natural flow of the river. I felt that if I could help get all my thoughts and feelings out in wool and fibers, especially doing the map series, showing the changes to the river every 10 years over the last century, I thought maybe this will help other people come to see it the same way I do. I think a lot of people just take it for granted and don't really pay attention to it. I think especially in Windsor, they don't have the same connection that we do out here because the causeway is literally a giant fortress wall and they don't see the tide changing every day. They just see the false lake, which you know upon first glance looks quite nice, but the reality is it doesn't really support life and it is man-made and in my opinion, and many others, it was a mistake. I'd love to see that corrected and I will continue making art about it until things are resolved or changed, which seems to be happening at the moment.
OH - So, is there something you want to investigate further here?
TR - I think when I first became a part of this society I found that although the museum was laid out really well, and they had a lot of information, it only represented a very, very small chapter in time, where it was primarily devoted to the wooden shipbuilding, which makes perfect sense because this was the site of a shipyard at one point in time, but the reality is many other cultures have also been here over the years. Before the English took (the land) away from the Acadians they had built a really great relationship with the Mi’kmaq, and the Mi’kmaq would come and camp here every year for hunting and fishing. So my goal for the last five or six years has been to try and better tell the stories of all the people that have lived here throughout time. Last year, with a great deal of work from Carolyn van Gurp, we launched Stewards of the Avon River, which showcases the Mi’kmaq, the Acadians, African Nova Scotians and the Planters. It felt so good to kind of see that come full circle and now our goals are to continue on with that and continue telling the stories. Also for me, my job has always been a bit of a treasure hunter. Not being from here I've had to kind of put together the pieces of the history of Avondale and I've gotten to know quite a few people from the community, but there's still so many people we don't know, so this project that we worked on this summer (Meet the People in our Neighbourhood), I think it’s really, really important and I feel like it could go on forever. We need to talk to everybody, especially the older generation. If we don't get their stories then that oral history will just disappear into the ether. I think it's really, really important that we gather that information while we can.
OH - Okay do you think that like some of the history has kind of already been lost? Do you think that we'll be able to, you know, discover more and more, or like what do you think is going to happen with this?
TR - What I’m finding right now, like I said, I think of it as a treasure hunt and with each conversation that you’ve had so far there's always at least one little nugget that is worth exploring further. So yes, there's a lot of information that's been lost and there's no way to gather that now, but I think as long as we can do our best going forward to collect these stories and dig deeper and continue on, I think there's a lot of detail that we can still find out.
OH - So, the board now has 15 members I believe, so is that the first time that it has had that many members, that you’ve been here?
TR - Since I’ve been involved it’s definitely the largest board, we usually sit at around eight, so it's going to be interesting to have that many people involved. I think everybody brings something a little different. There's a number of people that have returned and have been involved in the past. Maybe not necessarily on the board, but for instance Richard Armstrong, who was part of the boat building school, so I'm interested to talk to him because that's a big chunk of our history that I'm not so versed in. Also both he and Sarah Beanlands know a great deal of information on the Acadians and the local history relating to that. So I think between all the different people and skills it's going to be really great for us and allow us to grow faster than we could with just having a board of seven or eight, you know, many hands lighten the load.
OH - Why do you think there is more interest in being on the board and being involved, especially with people that have just moved here?
TR - I think part of it is we've just been so engaged with the community in the last few years that it's allowed people to kind of come out of the woodwork and feel comfortable contributing. It's because we have this nice cozy place that people can come either for a barbecue on Friday night, or the artists come and hang out Thursday afternoons, or the different festivals. It's just allowed us to connect with a lot more people than we were in the past when the cafe wasn't open and when we didn't have as much to offer. I feel like we have a lot more to offer and because of that we're constantly bringing more people in to enjoy our community.
OH - All right. So what do you hope to see in Avondale and the surrounding area and the future?
TR - I would love to see more entrepreneurs, which I think thanks to covid-19, is happening automatically. We just have no choice but to kind of make the most of it and think locally, and because of that there's going to be lots of new businesses popping up. I feel like a lot of the local businesses are really trying hard to work together right now. Like we all have the same goals and I want to see that continue on, just a giant web of connections between all of us, where we all scratch each other's back and try to help each other as much as we can.
OH - What do you see your contribution being in the future?
TR - I would like to pivot a bit more to being solely directed towards the arts and culture side. Now that we have Carolyn and her team helping out with the curative and the heritage side of things I want to really focus on my strengths. I wear many hats but my favorite is that of the artist and sometimes I get spread a little too thin, but now with so many other people helping I'd like to really focus on that area and hopefully other people will come in to fill in some of the gaps.
OH - What do you love about Avondale?
TR - What do I love about Avondale, just about everything! We considered moving here, but I realize part of my, or one of my favorite things about Avondale is actually the drive to Avondale every day. I feel like if I lived here we would be more likely to take everything for granted. So as a slight outsider I feel like I really, really appreciate every moment that I spend here and yeah, it's just an amazing place really. It's rare that you can experience throughout the day a tide coming in and creeping right up to the edge of the shore and then many hours later completely receding and seeing the ocean floor, like to me that's just a magical experience and I'm very grateful that I get to experience that on a regular basis.