Lamenting the Remnants: Complicated Nostalgia in the Work of Heather Benning

The still silence of Prairie winter, a freezing monochrome of snow, power lines, and slumped barbed-wire fences, the only sound a deep rushing of wind. A house appears, its siding browned and rotted, a white curtain valance fluttering in the glassless upper window. We hear the creak of a swing. We are suddenly inside the house, eerily incongruous with its exterior: a framed painting on a pastel-green wall, a jewelled chandelier, a couch with doilies neatly draped over its armrests and back. We cut back to the exterior. Low, sustained notes of music begin to swell under the wind. We reappear in a bedroom, then in the kitchen, watching the ties of an apron sway. Shots of stripped siding. The creaking swing. Then, a single rose in the window, its petals on fire. We blink. The rose is whole and untouched.

I first watched The Dollhouse (2015)​​¹, a short film that concludes Heather Benning’s art installation of the same name, at the University of Regina’s Land and the Imagination: A Symposium in 2017. The film is a chilling documentation of the destruction of The Dollhouse (2005-2013), an abandoned 1960s farmhouse turned life-sized dollhouse. Benning restored and decorated the interior with era-appropriate furniture before replacing the entire north wall with plexiglass, exposing the quaint pastel interior. The installation stood near Sinclair, Manitoba, from 2007 until Benning burned it to the ground in 2013—a spectacle brilliantly captured in the short film. The film was entrancing, evoking within me a strange mixture of nostalgia and unease. Why did I connect with this film? Why was the film so sad and haunting? Nearly three years later, Benning’s presentation—the film in particular—has remained vivid in my mind. I attribute that lasting impression to Benning’s skill as a storyteller, and her utilization of the uncanny to evoke and challenge my nostalgic relationship with the Prairies.

Heather Benning grew up on a family farm in rural Saskatchewan, ultimately pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and then a master’s degree in sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art. Her work has been featured in galleries and installed in rural locations across Canada and abroad. I had the opportunity to connect with Benning over email to talk about her work, her process, and her inspirations.

“I grew up with some great storytellers,” Benning writes to me, “my grandmothers, parents, Uncle Terry, Aunt Mary. Because of them I seek out other storytellers, where I can pull their tale into something that relates to what is happening now.”​​²

Story, then, is a significant inspiration for Benning, and she makes use of the uncanny to give those stories weight and resonance. I use “the uncanny” to refer to something that evokes a sense of familiarity but, at the same time, remains unnervingly strange or eerie.​​³ I felt that very combination of fear and familiarity seeing the empty dollhouse go up in flames. Having grown up in small-town Saskatchewan, I’ve seen my share of abandoned rural buildings, wondered about their histories and lamented their fates. They are remnants of my parents’ and grandparents’ eras, symbols of the stories they used to tell me of their lives. However, while the rural has often been romanticized, perceived as an escape from urbanity and a remnant of traditional, supposedly simpler times,​​⁴ its reality is far more complex. Nostalgia that lacks—or even refuses—critical awareness is dangerously naive. 

“I think it is important to reflect on the past but to move in the current,” Benning writes, in response to my query on whether her work aims to challenge idealized impressions of the past. “If you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat it. We know this line… Nothing from our past will fix our current situation if we do not accept our failures. Most of what I have created is documentation of monumentalized mistakes.”​​⁵

Indeed, the past is not without its horrors. Colonialism, systemic racism, and stark gender inequality are at the foundations of Prairie history, and Benning’s projects hint at those darker stories lurking beneath an oversimplified sense of nostalgia.

Benning was working as the artist in residence in Redvers, Saskatchewan, when she spotted the abandoned farmhouse she would later turn into The Dollhouse. From the time she acquired the house from Lisa and Alan Jones in 2005 to its opening to the public in mid-2007, Benning transformed the interior into a picturesque replica of a 1960s home. The rooms were brightly painted in yellow, pink, and green, with neatly arranged furniture: a couch with chairs and end tables in the living room; kitchen appliances and a few small tables for eating and for counter space; beds, dressers, and wooden chairs for the bedrooms. The walls are sparsely decorated, with only a few framed pictures and paintings, a telephone, and a mirror visible. Hockey skates hang in the closet under the stairs. Overall, it is a quaint snapshot of past lives, sequestered into neat, pastel boxes. And yet, those lives are missing. The house is conspicuously, unnervingly empty. Every item left out—the book and glasses on the kitchen table, the open briefcase and hanging shirt in one bedroom, even the pot left on the stove— indicates that someone had just been there but was suddenly prompted to leave. We peer through the glass for signs of life, but the house remains still and silent; we can only wonder where these people went and why. And yet, the thought of a life on display in such a way, exposed to the onlooker, is discomfiting. With these realizations, we are urged to think more critically about the history surrounding this structure. Is this home an idealized, simplified representation of the past, or a commentary on the events leading to its abandonment? A remnant of a bygone era may be preserved here, but the present is imminent and threatening. As the deteriorating exterior weighs down on the house, we know that the collapse of this moment is inevitable. 

Benning and Galloway’s film The Dollhouse presses this concept further, capturing the slow destruction of this home while undercutting its appearance of perfection. As the camera surveys the house, both inside and out, something immediately feels off. We hear that creaking swing, the ticking of a clock, the faint laughter of a child—echoes of the past lingering in this place of memory and imagination. And even as the camera moves through the house, those echoes playing in our ears, we notice the more unsettling details that we couldn’t see through the glass or in the pictures: the dirt and seeds clogging the cracks between the floorboards, the rust on the metal bed frame, the cracks in the paint, the thick cobwebs coating the rotary phone. Time is encroaching on this seemingly pristine environment, and we watch with bated breath as the flames jarringly creep into the frame until the house collapses entirely. And yet, The Dollhouse re-emerges, ghost-like, at the film’s end, glowing into the Prairie dusk. We wonder if the flames are even real,​​⁶ or if they serve to underscore that notion of imminent destruction. Perhaps there are traumas hidden within this too-perfect home that we never considered, that contributed or will contribute to its eventual abandonment.

“All of these [abandoned] houses raised families,” Benning has commented, “and then we just have these remnants left, these skeletons in our past, that we can look upon every once in a while and be nostalgic about, as though it was this better type of life, but it really wasn’t. I mean, there’s a reason why the houses are empty, and there’s a reason why nobody could take them over.”​​⁷

We may never know for certain why these buildings have been abandoned, but Benning’s project challenges us to consider the story behind their abandonment, and why the emptiness of The Dollhouse is so unnerving. Canada has seen significant changes to its rural populations over the generations. The development of new farming technologies and equipment has increased crop and animal yields and efficiency, and many Canadian farms have expanded as a result. But with rising operating expenses and corresponding debt, disrupting family farm succession plans and creating financial barriers for new farmers,​​⁸ the overall number of farms decreased by nearly 50% between 1971 and 2016.​​⁹ Financial hurdles aside, Canada’s rural past is also rife with the dark, unsettling stories we don’t talk about enough: the stories of early Indigenous farmers given insufficient resources and subpar equipment by an indifferent government,​​¹⁰ immigrants subjected to racist laws and attitudes,​​¹¹ and women restricted to domestic roles and denied equal rights. Benning encourages us to consider these realities before falling for nostalgia. When we romanticize the rural, what do we ignore? Who do we forget? 

Benning’s current project, Kil(n) Hand (2014-present), also challenges a nostalgic view of rural livelihoods by utilizing the uncanny. Kil(n) Hand uses a repurposed tobacco kiln to commemorate the role of the farmer within the stark changes to the agricultural industry through the succeeding generations. Benning was contacted by Dierdre Chisholm about creating a project in Norfolk County, Ontario, and through that conversation developed a two-part residency in Simcoe. “I felt it was necessary for me to spend a minimum of a month to six weeks in [the] area during ‘off season’ to get to know the area,” Benning explains. She spent her time connecting with locals and learning their stories through events, classes, and tours. “When I saw one of those buildings [a tobacco kiln] missing it[s] siding,” she continues, “its interior grid structure exposed, I knew I wanted to work with a tobacco kiln. I wanted to talk about the hand in farming and the structures of that type of farming.”​​¹² As with The Dollhouse, Benning replaced parts of the kiln walls with glass to expose the interior, but here the patches of the existing wall meet the glass in a jagged line, symbolizing the decline of the family farm in Ontario​​¹³—and, by extension, throughout all of Canada.

While The Dollhouse unsettles with its emptiness, Kil(n) Hand unsettles with its fullness. From afar, the kiln looks to be filled with bunches of tobacco, hanging from the interior grid to dry and cure after harvest. As we approach, however, we realize that these “bunches” are, in fact, hundreds of resin-cast hands that cut off at the forearm, hung from the wooden beams of the grid. The hands are a lurid brown, shining and ragged, and they appear flat or hollowed-out. The resin holds remarkable detail: we can see the veins on the back of the hand, the bones of the wrist, the shape of each fingernail, even the wrinkles around every knuckle. With such vivid texture, coupled with the yellowish light illuminating the kiln, we almost believe these sculptures to be the mottled remains of hundreds of people, hung on display. Such a spectacle evokes a visceral response: more than once, I have felt tempted to touch my own arms, as if to reassure myself that they were still there, still attached. Such a reaction is characteristic of the uncanny; we know these hands are not real, but they are so unnervingly lifelike that we are struck with the startling reminder of our own vulnerability, our own mortality.​​¹⁴

In exposing our affinity with these hands, we consider the people they were cast from: the generations of farmers who freely gave their bodies and lives to their work. No one raised in the rural would deny that farming is and always has been a difficult way of life, but those who would romanticize the lifestyle overlook its grittier elements. Our grandparents and great-grandparents struggled through drought, poverty, and back-breaking labour to cultivate a future for their descendants. My own great-grandparents used a bicycle to help break the first ten acres of land on their Saskatchewan homestead. And though new technologies have eased the intensity of physical labour, farmers today still have to contend with many stressors, including a dependency on good weather for profitable yields, global demand, social isolation, disappearing rural communities, and media scrutiny, all of which have a significant impact on mental health.​​¹⁵ The labour and sacrifice of farmers is startlingly apparent when we are faced with Kil(n) Hand’s dismembered hands taking the place of the crops they used to harvest. Benning cast most of these hands from the Stickl family, owners of a second-generation family farm who donated the kiln to her for the project, as a deliberate nod to the individual human lives necessary in the growing and harvesting of tobacco plants.​​¹⁶ Kil(n) Hand’s commemoration does not romanticize this life; it acknowledges struggle, sacrifice, and change.

As Benning has commented, “There will always be something abandoned… As industry continually changes and ‘upgrades,’ people are shifted and lives are left behind… Though Kil(n) Hand and [The] Dollhouse speak more towards agriculture and its changes, in a broader aspect these projects are simply talking about the migration of people, ‘progress’ and loss/change.”​​¹⁷

These themes of loss and metamorphosis are overwhelmingly clear in Sarcophagi: Larry and Rosalie (2015), a project which encompasses Benning’s use of the uncanny to counter selective nostalgia. Sarcophagi is modelled after Benning’s parents, including two life-sized sarcophagi and, on the wall behind them, relief sculptures depicting scenes from both of their lives. The white bodies of the sarcophagi lie on their backs on sheet-covered surfaces, their heads on thick, white pillows. Larry wears a ballcap and appears to be dressed in coveralls and heavy work boots, which fall open and away from each other in a relaxed position. Rosalie’s clothing is more comfortable, her legs crossed over a thin pillow, her feet bare. Like the hands in Kil(n) Hand, these sculptures are stunningly detailed. Wrinkles in clothing, strands of hair, even the crevices on the bottom of Larry’s boots and the soles of Rosalie’s feet—all are meticulously rendered. Above the sarcophagi are four relief sculptures, two each for Larry and Rosalie. Larry’s portraits feature him outdoors, as a child riding a horse and as a young man leaning on a car. The images of Rosalie also show her as a child and a young woman, but she appears in her living room and kitchen, respectively. 

At first, Sarcophagi seems quietly sad, a moving tribute, because it is. But like Kil(n) Hand, Sarcophagi commemorates the farmer within a changing industry—specifically, like Benning said of Kil(n) Hand and The Dollhouse, those “left behind” during those changes. The portraits memorialize the lives of the deceased, the happier times, long before the threat of change and death. We are invited to mourn their fates. The pristine white of these sculptures recalls the marble graves reserved for monarchs and nobles—an intentional connection, as Benning suggests that farmers are the unequivocal kings and queens of their own kingdoms.​​¹⁸

This is a tribute that carries a subtle darkness within it. A grave requires us to think of the past through the lens of death, and we cannot separate ourselves from that looming fact as we review the lives of Larry and Rosalie, these idyllic scenes that grow steadily more disquieting as we ponder them. Benning has said that this project is a personal farewell to the livelihood of her parents, as neither she nor her siblings would be taking over the family farm from them,​​¹⁹ but it is easy to see this project as a more universal story, a representation of rural life in the past versus the present. Larry’s attire emphasizes the physical labour demanded of farmers, and that hard work wasn’t ultimately enough to carry a family farm into the next generation. The backgrounds of the relief sculptures are empty, the landscape unidentifiable, and the experiences depicted—riding a horse, leaning on a vehicle, or standing in a living room or kitchen—are seemingly generic. The contrast between these figures—Larry’s scenes of freedom and Rosalie’s of domesticity—hint at the persistence of traditional gender roles in rural society, a lingering inequality that debilitated early Prairie women and continues to impact the lives of women today. Most importantly, though, this story could be anyone’s story, and therefore it could be my own. This creeping realization, that my own family and my neighbours’ families could be represented in the graves before me, is a bleak reminder of our shared histories, mortality, and vulnerability to change.

I asked Benning what she hopes audiences will take from her work, and she emphasized that it is not up to her. “I want the audience to see themselves in the work, find their story,” she writes. “I lay it down in my way as honest as I can.”​​²⁰

For every image that evokes our nostalgia—be it an abandoned building, a picturesque farmhouse, or pictures of pleasant memories—Benning underscores it with the uncanny, creating scenes that feel at once familiar and eerily off. Our discomfort forces us to consider the sobering realities of injustice, trauma, and death that may feature in the stories behind these pieces, the stories that families and communities may not necessarily want to share or remember. Stories of violence and prejudices sprung from colonialism, sexism, and racism are as much a part of rural past as stories of community and farmers’ perseverance. One cannot idealize the latter without overlooking the former, and so Benning finds these stories, hovering within the abandoned buildings and overgrown corners of our past, and brings them to light again.

Jaclyn Morken is an emerging writer and editor from Saskatchewan. She completed an MFA in Writing and BA Hons in English at the University of Saskatchewan, and her work can be found in antilang no. 1, Dually Noted (March 2019), River Volta Review of Books, and F(r)iction Log. She is currently a Junior Editor with Brink Literacy Project.

1. The Dollhouse, directed by Heather Benning and Chad Galloway, 2015.
2. Heather Benning, personal interview, November 24, 2019.
3. “The Uncanny,” Tate, tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/t/uncanny.
4. For example, a growing number of people are adopting “homesteader” livelihoods, for some an opportunity to practice sustainable farming, and for others a return to “traditional” and romanticized settler lifestyles. See Bianca Bosker, “The Strange Allure of Pioneer Living,” The Atlantic (Nov. 2018), https://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/shaye-elliott-homesteading/570796/; Sara Fraser, “Homesteading: How P.E.I. couples are reinventing the family farm,” CBC.ca, September 26, 2016, cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-homesteading-family-farm-1.3775604; and Lisa M. Butler Harrington, “Alternative and Virtual Reality: Agriculture and the Countryside as Embodied in American Imagination” Geographical Review, 108, no. 2 (Apr. 2018): 250-273, DOI: 10.111/gere.12245.
5. Benning, personal interview.
6. In a video interview on her work, Benning proposes that the fire could be a “nightmare,” but that the standing house could also be a “daydream.” See “Heather Benning: Prairie Gothic.” YouTube, uploaded by Craig Chaplin, September 28, 2017, https://youtube.com/watch?v=axF97JuCPuQ.
7. “Heather Benning: Prairie Gothic.” YouTube.
8. Jessica Smith Cross, “Aging farmers with no succession plans put future of Canadian family farms at risk,” CBC.ca, July 16, 2017, https://cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/family-farm-aging-farmers-canada-1.4207609; “Farm income, 2018,” Statistics Canada, May 28, 2019, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/daily-quotidien/190528/dq190528a-eng.pdf?st=-vS6IERG.
9. “A portrait of a 21^st century agricultural operation.” Statistics Canada, May 17, 2017, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/95-640-x/2016001/article/14811-eng.htm.
10. Carter, Sarah, “Indigenous Reserve Agriculture to 1900,” Indigenous Saskatchewan Encyclopedia, https://teaching.usask.ca/indigenoussk/import/indigenous_reserve_agriculture_to_1900.php.
11. Waiser, Bill, “Racism against immigrants is nothing new in Saskatchewan, it just looks a little different,” CBC.ca, Sept. 19, 2019, https://cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/opinion-waiser-saskatchewan-racism-nothing-new-1.5287365.
12. Benning, personal interview.
13. Leah Sandals, “Supersizing Prairie Gothic: The Art of Heather Benning,” canadianart, August 8, 2014, https://canadianart.ca/interview/heather-benning.
14. For a discussion of the ‘uncanny valley’ and eerily human-like art, see Ragnhild Tronstad, “The Uncanny in New Media Art,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 16 (2-3), 2009.
15. Lynn Desjardins, “Canadian farmers facing more stress, mental health problems,” Radio Canada International, May 23, 2019, https://rcinet.ca/en/2019/05/23/canada-agriculture-depression-anxiety/.
16. Sandals, “Supersizing Prairie Gothic.”
17. Ibid.
18. “Heather Benning: A Prairie Gothic.”
19. Ibid.
20. Benning, personal interview.

This article is published in issue 37.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue