Suspended Ingredients for World Design

This week, I had the opportunity to show "Suspended Ingredients for World Design", a piece I created for the Environmental Studies Association of Canada (ESAC) annual conference at l'Université de l'Ontario français (UOF) in Toronto. The piece hung in the North Gallery at George Brown from May 26-28, and was featured with the works of other artists in a show called From Crisis to Creativity.

The art piece is a wall hanging measuring about 3' x 3', constructed from handknit yarn. A series of 28 pockets contain glass vials with samples from the spaces where life happens on my property.

This piece started with a story. "It is an artifact from 2100, made by a woman from a country that was known as Canada. She needed to create an easy to transport wrapping to store small samples of what she thought were the ingredients of a beautiful and healthy world. Thankfully, her samples have survived. We converted her beautifully stitched and decorated hand-knit piece into a wall hanging. Within its pockets are small jars containing seeds and earth among other hand-made artworks that could help to inform us in our re-worlding of Earth."

As a story, this is a scenario starting point, but there is so much more to unpack. Like, what is the significance of these 28 ingredients and what stories do they carry? And are they connected to each other in any ways? The ingredients are important to me for various reasons, but they constitute an assemblage unique to place, my home. They also present insights about humans as collectors.

A source of rich dialogue among the conference participants, I've transported the piece back to Waterloo for further analysis and iterations to be the subject of a new article.

The conference was a wonderful gathering of peers from across Canada, and featured so many emerging scholars working with arts-based methods in environmental studies. It was affirming - I'm on the right track. And I came away from the conference with so many wonderful, new connections and budding collaborations.