The World to Come
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The World to Come is about the ever-changing nature of gardens and the many ways they evoke the human condition. This work reckons with the darkness of gardens as colonial symbols of control and human supremacy over nature, and sees their potential as sites for collective reimagining. Within the garden lie a myriad of contradictions: labor and rest, growth and decay, hope and despair, all which seem to pull at each other in opposite directions, but we know them together intimately and we experience their coexistence in our daily lives.
My lived experience serves as my primary material for generating this work. I am inspired by everyday moments of walking, photographing my surroundings, and engaging and conversing with my community. Who I am and the place I make from seeps into everything. I live on Treaty Six territory, a traditional gathering place for diverse Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Dene, Inuit, and others. By situating myself in this way, at this particular place and at this particular time, I reckon with the current historical moment we live in. I ask myself what it means to create art at this moment in time, connecting art to a practice of the every day, and using that as a tool to find enchantment in the face of catastrophe and to learn about the world.
A garden may seem like a small thing when trying to navigate our apocalyptic times, but at its best, it is a reminder that caring for the world means caring deeply for ourselves, our communities, and the ecosystems we are a part of. Through printmaking, drawing, installation, and sculpture I turn my studio into a place to transform my own experiences of grappling with the beauty and the pain at the heart of the story of the garden. Although I did not execute the entirety of my thesis using printmaking, I am enamored by the indirect, layered ways it allows me to create. The very nature of the process –its physical qualities of repetition and reversal, amongst others– provided me with a framework for making. Drawing from real and imagined gardens –from Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the lavish palace gardens of empire, to memories of my childhood home’s garden, to visits to local gardens and their gardeners– I’ve come to see history, land, stewardship, and power all contained within. The whole world is here in the garden.
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http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_1843
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en