Peter Coffman: Anglicana Tales: Stories of the Nova Scotian Church, Shown and Told

Halifax will host the 39th Session of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada from 3 – 11 June. Central to the activities will be the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the first Anglican service in mainland Canada at Annapolis Royal in 1710. Peter Coffman, a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Dalhousie University, is an architectural historian specializing in English medieval and Canadian Gothic Revival architecture. During his tenure at Dalhousie, Coffman, also an accomplished photographer, has been documenting the rich and varied architecture of urban and rural Anglican churches in Nova Scotia – including the recent controversial dismantling of the 200 year-old All Saints Anglican Church in Granville Centre due to its sale and export to a Baptist congregation in Abita Springs, Louisiana. In response to the presence of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, Coffman was invited by the Dalhousie Art Gallery to prepare an exhibition that photographically illustrates and poetically elucidates his recent research. Playing with the structure of Chaucer’s medieval Canterbury Tales, Coffman offers: Anglicana Tales is a celebration of the extraordinary contribution of the Anglican Church to the built heritage of Nova Scotia. A series of photographs divided into eight narrative ‘tales’, it is a visual and verbal evocation of memories and stories drawn from three centuries of Anglican presence in the province. As well as marking that tricentennial milestone, the exhibition coincides with the Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod in Halifax. These ‘tales’ present a polyphony of stories that interweave, intersect, diverge, complement, and even contradict one another. Each tale is like the lens of a camera: it includes some features, excludes others, puts certain things into sharp focus and blurs the rest. Together, they form a tangled collage that is as delightful to the photographer as it is perplexing to the historian. Integral features of a uniquely compelling natural and human landscape, the churches shown in the exhibition contain much of the cultural DNA of the province. Anglicana Tales fosters the hope that these buildings, memories and stories will prove to be as indelible as they are beautiful.