From the ruins: Calgary artist found inspiration in wake of 2013 floods

This week marks the 10 year anniversary of the southern Alberta floods, which left five people dead across the province, wrecked thousands of homes, and caused over $5 billion in damages, in what was one of Canada’s costliest disasters.

Every June, Neil Liske, an artist who has lived in the Calgary community of Bowness for 40 years, finds himself going back in time.

That’s because he lived through one of the worst natural disasters in Canadian history, in one of the areas hardest hit by the 2013 Calgary flood.

“The current was so strong through the basement, it lifted the floor, it was just incredible what it did,” Liske recalled. “The basement had to be completely gutted and rebuilt, right down to the studs.

“It was just absolute chaos.”

Like many, Liske’s basement was destroyed as a result of the flood. Many of his possessions — timeless photographs, furniture, clothing were all destroyed.

“The biggest thing I lost was a lot of my photography, that was the biggest thing that was really [hard]. And some other things — I did a lot of climbing and mountaineering. But life goes on, I guess, except for being uncomfortable with June coming up every year,” he said.

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The clean up would take months.

A reminder of how bad things got, is the door leading to Liske’s workshop — a dark water line past his waist.

During the clean-up Liske says he found hope following the devastation. The artist found motivation for his next masterpiece in an unlikely place — under his deck.

He got to work, using the silt to create ceramics. Honing in on its dark, earthy colour was a way of healing and moving forward, he says.

“I got up in the morning and I just had this desperate feeling that, how am I going to pull this together,” he said. “I made little teacups and I gave them to the people up and down the street I knew.”

Calgary artist Neil Liske made coffee and tea cups from the silt that built up under his deck following the historic 2013 floods. (Logan Stein, CityNews image)

A decade later, the 86-year-old still has one cup that remains — a coffee cup — a reminder of what he and his neighbours had went through.

He says its allowed him to move forward with his life, and focus on what’s next.

“I still wake up with that depressed feeling that I had coming back, it’s really indicative of, you can hear about people going through really hard things and you sympathize with them, but unless you go through it yourself you can’t know the extent of it,” Liske said.