Mycelium “threads” create large underground networks in forests and other plant communities when they spread and join with plant roots. These mycorrhizal networks connect individual plants together, meaning that not only are they critical to supplying nutrients that keep our forests healthy, but they also enable communication. Through webs of interconnected natural ropes, viewers are invited to engage in a tactile exploration that reflects this hidden world. Through their active engagement, the public can shape and influence the direction of the installation. As an artist, farmer and scholar, Chan-Dow believes that fostering a sense of connection, collective action and stewardship towards the natural world is crucial for the sustainability of our planet and its inhabitants.

Elaine Chan-Dow, a Toronto-based photographer and multi-disciplinary artist, delves into the convergence of behavioural science, botany, and art. With degrees in Urban Geography, Image Arts, and a Master of Fine Art, Elaine’s previous work examined the intricate relationship between memory, objects, and individuals with impaired cognitive abilities. Her current work highlights the interconnection of art, humanity, and the natural world for biodiversity preservation and environmental sustainability. Elaine’s conceptual works have been showcased at institutions and in private collections, including her latest public installation at Butterfield Park, OCAD University. She is currently a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University.

Chaka Chikodzi works with volcanic rock from Zimbabwe; in his sculptures, the stone is a historical material that tells a story about the past as well as the future. Through these works, Chikodzi invites audiences to imagine new ways of belonging, marking time, and making our presence felt in the future.

Chikodzi is a Zimbabwean-Canadian stone sculptor based in Kingston. He began sculpting as a teenager and has a studio in Kingston and in Mvurwi, Zimbabwe, where he works with a team of assistants. His work is inspired by the beauty and simplicity of the natural rock formations that are unique to Zimbabwe’s landscape. Working with Zimbabwean stone here in Canada, he has become increasingly interested in the stone itself—in the story it tells about geological history and in the relationship that he has forged with it over years of living between two continents.

Representing fears and reveries of the forest, Francisco Corbett conceives of his installation as a set for a performance.

Francisco Corbett is a visual and performance artist based in Kingston, Canada. He is the director of an art studio, FORWORLD, and his practice focuses on building community and empowering young people. Corbett has been practicing professionally for fewer than 5 years but promises a relentless effort of creation to viewers and fans of his artwork.

With The Ones That Made Landfall, Sadiqa de Meijer recognizes the duality of species introduced to North America, their enriching fertile qualities and their destructive potential. The installation mimics their often brash and passionate importation, against the slower settler logistics that attempt to “affix English to the land with fences.”

Sadiqa de Meijer’s latest books are the language memoir alfabet/alphabet and the poetry collection The Outer Wards. With Amy Rubin, she formed the artist duo The Woolgatherers, practicing textile and performance arts. de Meijer’s writing has won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the CBC Poetry Prize, Arc’s Poem of the Year Award, and other honours. Recurring themes in her work include landscape, language, decolonization, migration, and spirituality. She lives in Katarokwi/Kingston, where she is currently Poet Laureate.

Sensory drawings are recordings of perceptual processes that take place when visiting a distinct site or when sitting across from a tree or a plant. Elvira Hufschmid is a European multimedia artist and academic. Her extensive place-based conceptual drawing practice emerges from a deeply felt (inter)-relationality to the living earth and a sensory approach of communicating with the other-than-human world.

Elvira Hufschmid holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, US, and taught as a Visiting Artist at Emily Carr University and as a Guest Professor for ‘Artistic Transformation Processes’ at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany. Hufschmid is currently a PhD candidate in the Queen’s University Cultural Studies program with a focus on “aesthetic transformation” processes as participatory strategies to investigate colonial property formation in Canada as well as to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations between art and astroparticle physics.

A Voluminous Crush is made to appear as if a real estate development billboard has been soiled by a rising flood. Alvin Luong depicts his family home in the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City with an encroaching green tide. Within it are hundreds of drawings of the Southeast Asian vegetable rau muong, also known as river spinach; once rationed to his family in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, it will be a protagonist in coming climate change crisis.

Alvin Luong works with stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic working class communities to create artworks that reflect upon historical development and its intimate effects on the lives of people. His focus is expressed through videos, photographs, and sculptures. Luong has shown and screened artworks in places including the Images Festival (Toronto), Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), and The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver). The artist has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Gallery TPW (Toronto). The artist’s works have been acquired and shown by The Rockefeller Foundation (New York City).

Jill Price invites you take some quiet time to sit down and write a letter to or on behalf of trees. Price is developing an un/making methodology to draw attention to how “all art is land art.” She works at the intersection of drawing, sculpture, performance, digital media, and speculative fiction to explore the material entanglements of human and more-than-human lives. At her best when surrounded by plants, sipping a buttery chardonnay, and on a sunny step with a neighbourhood cat, Jill Price is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist of German, Scottish, Welsh and Ashkenazi descent grateful to be living on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Wendat Nation, in Barrie, Ontario. She is an award-winning mixed media artist and scholar currently in the final stages of a SSHRC-funded research-creation PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Price holds a BFA and B.Ed. from Western University and was awarded a 2016 Social Studies and Humanities Research Grant, 2017 Michael Smith Foreign Study Bursary, and the 2017 Research & Writing Award for her OCADU MFA thesis “Land as Archive.”

This lodge constructed in a traditional Haudenosaunee fashion will be gradually cladded with story tiles fired with “wild” clay from No.9 Gardens. The Along the Way Playgroup seeks to be guided by and in conversation with place, to come to terms with the original history of the areas at intersections of water and land—where we are on Turtle Island. Then, to practice a mindset of reciprocity with the waterways and their many living spiritual beings, this group of artists has been meeting at key sites in Kingston and the Rideau Lakes watershed. They focus on land-based artistic practices and witnessing the land from the perspective of First Nations and the clan animals, seeking to hear the stories from the legacy of cultural inter-relation spanning thousands of years on these waterways.

Funded by the Ontario Arts Council, the playgroup is a partnership-building project with Queen’s University Biological Station and the City of Kingston, Cultural Service and is facilitated by Sonia Nobrega, Senior Manager, QUBS, and Taylor Norris, Public Art Coordinator, City of Kingston, along with Agnes’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Sunny Kerr.

This summer (2023), the artists and partners close their circle, ending three years of seasonally timed activities with public, site-based events. These take place at No.9 Gardens and Arbour Ridge Park, Kingston.

This project is funded by a Regional Tourism Ontario Partnership grant, Canada Council for the Arts and City of Kingston Arts Fund.