This project is about discovering the natural community of the Brick Works, orienting participants in public programs to the yields of the naturalized space, and creating a culture of storytelling around it. All of these specimens are artifacts that in the future could become fossils, but they are able to be the inspiration for stories today that are shared and used to facilitate a deeper connection to place. By physically connecting the map space and specimen display, there will be an open invitation to experience nature, history and storytelling from every individual experience (whether or not visitors are directly participating in formal Evergreen programs). The culture of the Brick Works will continue to grow and evolve as these stories, artifacts and places become interwoven in this artistic interactive display.
Installed in with funds from Evergreen’s Interpretive budget in 2011, the interpretive display was crafted by Charles Jevons (Swordcraft.ca) and the slate map sandblasted by Cobalt Fabrications. the Concept of a personal/public nature museum is well articulated in the book: coyote’s guide to connecting with nature. This project is a collaboration with Lee Earl, outdoor educator at Evergreen Brick Works.
These paintings were made both as emblems for the 30 day journey spanning the northern half of France and into Holland back in 2007, and as sweetener to the deal proposed to those who had hired us to stand in for avian experts and create an environmental impact study to interpret how wind turbines effect birds. This task we did diligently, not fully understanding the implications to the health of the bioregion, crafting a study littered with fully articulated impacts on birds as well as lofty goals for mitigating impact-peppered with a strong disclaimer-we are artists, not biologists (see excerpts here). I exchanged the ten paintings, plus the environmental impact report for transit back to montreal on a cargo ship, and funding for my friends project in India kick-starting traditional craft economies.
each bird portrait was made half from memory, half imagination, then the closest relative identified in the field guide to birds we were seeing in the farms and fields proposed for the wind turbine project. each work is titled for this bird, and the descriptions on the back are like the game, two truths and a lie, each one holding two true facts and one imagined one.
this method of painting from imagination and memory relies on spending weeks in the field observing birds behavior and identifying them in a field guide. this sourcing of imagery for painting relies on first hand knowledge to be able to then use the strongest memories and impressions from the physical experience of being close to actual birds to paint from. this is an important distinction to me since it relies on drawing people into connection with the natural world, going out to observe and eventually find empathy with the winged sentinels of the forest.
each work is ink and watercolor, 9″ x 11″ and stitched to cardboard, as these were the most efficient materials i have found to use while camping and hitch-hiking.
the following photographs and text contain a true story which unfolded through the fields, mountains and motor-ways of france in 2007. there is nothing more to describe. i love to create new experiments in how imagery and commentary can stand in for conventional dry storytelling, therefore, the story may connect to the images, or it may not. see what you can imagine through the visuals and text. enjoy. in a sense the paintings above are the conclusion, as they marked the end of this adventure, and were left in the executive offices of the wind turbine company who hired us, the ceo saying as i departed; “my wife will love these….”
"In the pine top of my work table, the dark knots are boulders standing up in the river of grain, sending eddies and ripples spinning downstream, delivering the driftwood thoughtof a new journey to be taken, through trees." Roger Deakin, 'wildwood, a journey through trees', pp.32, Penguin Books, Toronto, Canada, 2007.
This will become a cycle of 50 paintings within the next three months, which will be mounted so that the water systems that are mapped out of the existing grain drain into each other and become a real document of the grain, i.e. a map of the landscape and conditions which the tree originally grew in, as well as an imagined topography created through the inferrence of grain patterns into landforms and features.
After spending literally years following the symbols of maps while traveling and sometimes without the assistance of visibility, like on the tops of mountains, i have used the symbols to guide me safely to shelter. this training made it impossible to not imagine these landforms in the plywood grain, as soon as i sketched them out i began to see rivers, lakes and water-systems, mountains, and could infer where i would look for clean water or shelter.
both the process of tracking grain in industrial plywood, understanding what different lines may indicate in terms of climate or sunlight and the process of imagining topography into grain resonate with the desire to square up and subjugate natural organic forms to geometric, and therefore human-centric patterns. making round spiral grain lay flat with glue and heat. imagining the bridge you would build over the river, the rectangular house on the cliff, which catches southern light, etc.
i am certainly not knocking the desire to square up nature, since the countless hours trying to master broad axes and hatchets, to achieve those straight lines needed to say, make a table out of dynamic cedar grain, would make that insult a little insincere. what i take issue with, and reflect through these paintings is that more often when you ask someone to define what wood is, it comes in 2″ x 4″ instead of growing out there somewhere.
outside of these political views, its quite calming and fun to follow a pattern, especially one which can reveal new insights into how trees grow and what the activity of mapping expresses about our intentions towards wilder landscapes.
speaking of which, i am now going out to discover some tracks left by creatures dwelling in the ravine, by the marks left in this, toronto’s first real snowfall!
choose your direction wisely…pirates will be popping up and learning about the floods in the don valley in the children’s garden at evergreen brickworks this coming spring. will they learn how to survive pirates? or will the pirates teach them high sea survival….time will tell.
guarding the gate of the childrens garden @ evergreen brickworkswith sticks grown purposefully in a garden of willow and dogwoods, or as the forester’s of the early british countryside would call, a coppice, this wee beasty overlooks visitors upon entering.
see a video of the teens who helped harvest the willow here:
the earth science of this art lies in the ability of willow and dogwood to reproduce through any dormant (leafless) cutting or twig. then specific rods are chosen for structural form and placed as to fill in the sculpture as they grow.
thereafter individual willows will leaf out and change the form of the sculpture as it grows in the most unpredictable shapes, which can then in later years be trimmed or further woven in as a seasonal project. kind of like farming pretty trees, but in inspiring shapes. think bonsai.
check out other willow work here:
http://www.foolishnature.org/homely/environmental/wood/wood.html
while creating more work in terms of seasonal trimming can seem like adding inputs/chores/more energy into yard maintenance, willow actually is one of the most productive crops that can be grown in an environmental education center/school-ground. i hope we all know by now that there is a clear disconnection from the seasonal nature of land based activities, meaning that many urban dwellers wouldn’t, as common knowledge, know that garlic should be planted before the first frost outdoors to get that jump on spring it needs. it is therefore productive to plant and cultivate species of easily maintained willows, who benefit and are encouraged to grow if cut in the winter, since this helps children and adults to reconnect to seasonal work and gain memorable insights into reproducing plants and trees to foster an understanding of how to become more self-resilient. can’t argue with that. ha.
next onto ‘the beaver’ at the other gate.
s of dundas, w side of ossington
What happens to the knots now?!? Maybe trim the growth bonsai style? Make liTtle insects and animals with the green stems? Make geometric shapes?
knot in the window of belong at the brickworks.
this is a map of activites and value-adding products made from branchwood.
living pussy willow
This knot was harvested in cassandra public school while the snow was blowing over a workshop on planting a living willow tunnel for the evergreen all hands in the dirt forum. In four months I have woven around 150-200 knots mostly from the material harvested at cassandra.
Since I was 12 or so I have been drawing celtic inspired knotworks mostly drawn from the book of kells and similar, though I would get through a letter sized knot and lose patience after 3-4 hours, because the drawing had a predictable end.
As I have said elsewhere the willow knots are waste material because of the way the were pruned or chewed in years past, and are not prime for fencing or basketry. Each break in the leader shoot produces two or more off-shoots which are the structural basis for each knot, and there are few options for weaving and tying these knots other than in the configuration I have made them. The only limitation to this statement is that I have noticed through time that as I become proficient and evolve different means of attaching willow to itself, different patterns evolve.
This, coupled with the awe-inspiring male or female catkins (or in the case of the dogwood I am working with now rosette style flowers) followed by leaves, brings the impetus to continue making knots far beyond my early drawings.
I am not sure if you have looked at the book of kells, but many of the illuminated knots represent animals, people or other symbols, and in this practice I will continue to create increasingly representational forms.
The first experiments have taken forms of insects, but recently I made a small beaver out of red osier dogwood.
Literally every day I am learning from the progressive revelation of growing stems and leaves, which I think of as knots growing out, like problems solving themselves.
I will post more revelations as they progress, hopefully into massive scale living representatives of animals subsisting on willow and dogwood in the don (like the beavers living in the mud banks of the don-1.5m long!).
One knot at a time though. 🙂
Morgan Zigler.
willow also from cassandra public school
Have you ever tried to educate others in connecting to cycles of time older or slower than those occupying most of our schedules and visual space (checking your mobile for the time every 15 seconds) but find that the vehicles and models we use to teach about healthy culture are increasingly speeding up? Me too. I write this to advance some partial survival strategies for connecting the social/env dots as we speed along on the e-ngo train, in the hope that you will comment/improve and expand upon this strategy. But first: slow time…
Some partial examples of slower time could include those popularised by non-profit orgs, such as the life-cycles of plants or trees, how many generations have passed since toronto was covered in 2km of ice, geological events (past warming that could predict what a warmer climate would look like here), or even more extreme; the light in the night sky likely to already be extinct.
All of these are familiar concepts and are used to attempt to salve and create compassion for the natural world, to advocate for campaigns to save and protect both nature and the flow of capital into what I have recently heard named the non-profit industrial complex.
This is a rhetoric which I have embodied entirely in years past, and have based many workshops, programs, and education strategies upon: that if you can get someone in touch with nature and its rhythm, then they will slow down consumption, with slow food, cooperative social enterprises, and greener and more sustainable lifestyle decisions which will save the planet.
It should be apparent by now, since being toted as the ultimate and consummate moral guilt, that we must create change in society to reduce CO2 emissions and halt disasterous run away climate change.
With increasing exponential speed the number of e-ngo’s (environmental non governmental organisations) is growing, engaging multitudes of energised and emotionally charged youth, garnering funds from every sector and creating huge numbers of temporary stewardship events, gardens, services and spaces.
The distilled message reads: create change faster.
I write this to anyone who has first hand experience in trying to create systemic change in/with/through the non-profit sector to slow the consumer machine and put some sort of emotional leash on runaway climate change, but has encountered en-route that funding cycles, abstracted deliverables or more plainly the pace of e-ngo change moves much too quickly for plants and trees to come to maturity, or too fast for half a dozen students to watch a seedling sprout, mature and bear seed.
This ability to take the long view is learned in plant and animal husbandry through successive seasons, and if you are trying to educate people there are only so many places to plant perennials; to turn the compost, and with urban space constraints you are left with two strategic options: 1-increase the number of people participating to the max and shorten their exposure to each nature related participatory element to ensure reliable growth of the organisation or 2-observe the land for its potential curriculum already in the earth, including what is the responsibility of people to degraded land, and find a specific group who will yield greatest benefit carrying out the restoration/husbandry curriculum.
This second methodology ensures healthy linkages between education in participant’s lives and resilient restoration of the land which can only be nurtured by taking the appropriate time to allow people, plants, animals and plans to mature.
What are the principal hindrances to slowing down, elongating progress or taking the long view?
Some would say: funding cycles, the non-profit industrial complex, or the unfortunate disease of urbanity whose symptoms include the inability to understand and prioritise nature education as a strategic goal to creating change.
When I travelled back to ruskin mill educational trust in SW england to inquire about strategies for creating a curriculum based on cultivating a relationship with the land I was told: in researching the historical land use going back two thousand years, we selected activities which brought healing to the more recent industrial trauma, like coppicing or fish farming, and developed a four year immersion program for teens with special needs based on those activities.
For us to discover and deliver such depth, here in the don valley in Toronto, we would first have to address the colonial context of such work, ensuring we are not just the most recent people to see grand economic visions on land that is not ours, and then begin, slowly, to find how people in the valley’s past would create fertile soil, would steward the forest, and take care of its creatures. Despite the pace and trajectory of many e-ngo’s today, it is likely that through wilful and slow motion action, there is still room for the kind of progression towards healing that would characterize real change in my opinion. The trick is to pretend that you are participating in the cult of the deliverables enough to keep your job, but not so much that you forget the pace that projects, plants, people, and trees really grow.
P.s. Maple syrup time anyone???
foolishNATURE 