By Pepper Parr
August 16, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON
It was a wonderfully hot day but if you were at the edge of the water the breeze made it all bearable – certainly so for the hundreds of kids and their parents who had taken over Spencer Smith Park.
If you were walking along Lakeshore Road between say between John Street and the Art Gallery of Burlington shortly after noon you would have come across a procession of people carrying what might have looked like small tree branches painted vivid colours.
They were being led by a young man playing a saxophone – if you thought it was some kind of a procession – you were right – but a funeral procession?
The funeral mound of Henrietta Martin.
Bit of a stretch but if you were in on the event from the beginning when it started at John Street you would have known that it was an “installation art” funeral procession for “The Beloved Departed”
There were no hymns; there was music. This was a very “white” event.
The parasols covering the funeral mound of Henrietta Markham were later used by those in the procession to the Art Gallery of Burlington.
Words were spoken. A few lines from the 17th century poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick were read:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
Then the procession along Lakeshore Road.
It was whimsical, it was a Kyle Tonkens piece of interactive installation art done in the memory of Henrietta Markham, who in a letter said to come from the grave, said:
In the eyes of those whose lives you’ve touched,
You are a heavenly gift.
Beautiful and awe inspiring.
Beautiful.