DOUGLAS COUPLAND

“Most people don’t believe me when I tell them that the Lower Mainland once had a Ford factory, most likely because we don’t really make anything here, but it really did once exist here, in Burnaby on the site of what is now the Station Square development. It opened in 1938 and closed in 1968. In my head I view it as a ghost of a long-gone era when making cars in the middle of an ecological quasi-utopia still seemed like a not bad idea.

I then began to research what happens to Ford factories once they’re taken down, and I was happy to discover this magical substance called fordite, after, yes, the Ford Motor Company. What is fordite? In Michigan, in ageing Rust Belt steel towns like River Rouge, Detroit and Kalamazoo, minerologists have located the sites of abandoned spray-painting booths and from them extracted chunks of layered automotive enamel paint, often up to twenty centimetres thick. These paint layers quickly inform experts what model of car the paint was used, and what year it was sprayed down. These vibrantly tinted coloured paint layers are not unlike the layers of the Grand Canyon and, as with most sedimentary forms, can be called minerals, in this case, an ‘anthropogenic,’ or man-made mineral. Fordite chunks, when broken and polished, become extraordinarily beautiful precious stones and are highly sought after in the gemological world.

For the Station Square site I created stacks of polished fordite gems that are deliberately bold to remind people in a jubilant way that we once, not even long ago, lived in a world where car colours were used as they still are in fashion, to hasten a vehicle’s shortened lifespan and to build expectation for newer and more differently coloured cars. As this seems like an unlikely dynamic to return in the near future, we may as well enjoy the accidental joy that still flows from a long gone, and not unhappy era.” —Douglas Coupland, 2022

Douglas Coupland (1961, Canadian) is an internationally celebrated author as well as one of Canada’s best known contemporary artists. He is widely recognized for his unique take on pop culture, 20th century pop art, and Canadiana. Coupland is a graduate of Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, as well as the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan. Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.