Jan Janzen (1955- )

May 24

In Builders of the Pacific Coast, author Lloyd Kahn describes discovering the shake-covered bower next to the Tofitian and admiring its harmony, said he’d “never seen anything like it. “The entire structure, posts and beams and all, was made of silvery beach wood, with curved and irregular pieces put together ingeniously.…It worked as a bower but it was also a graceful sculpture. It looked like it had grown in the woods.”

Sculptor and builder, “Jan Janzen was born in the Quesnel Highlands of Cariboo County (in the heart of BC) and grew up in Vancouver. In the early ’70s, when he was 20, he left the city for the Okanagan Valley where he went through a ‘wandering phase’, hiking. camping, and gathering edible plants. For 4-5 years, he roamed in the dry desert from Southern BC to Washington ‘communing with nature’. He came back to Vancouver in the ’80s and worked as a carpenter: ‘90-degree drywall stuff’, but on the side started doing wood sculptures.

In 1987, he moved to the west coast of Vancouver Island. He built a woodshed for his landlady, where he started combining sculpture with carpentry, and next did an extreme remodel of a tiny A-frame (with greenhouse attached) for his wife Thérèse Bouchard. Here on the coast, he says he was able to combine carpentry and sculpture, to ‘marry them together’. He could do sculpture and have it be useful.”

Curator George Patterson asked him to build the Gazebo and Storytelling Hut at the former Tofino Botanical Gardens and Janzen proposed creating the “Dryad” sculpture for the nearby rainforest.

Sources: Builders of the Pacific Coast by Lloyd Kahn, interviews with George Patterson, Jan Janzen.

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