Conversations with Trees
From the personal to the political, this exhibition during DesignTO 2024 considers our complicated relationship to the land. Themes of memory, connection/disconnection and healing consider the idea that through conversation we can begin to confront our relationship to the non-human world.
Using trees as the central vehicle of exploration, this multi-sensory exhibition combines wood sculpture, objects, visual media and scent to invoke an emotional response. Through tactile and engaged encounters with physical artifacts we have the potential to reconnect to our humanity and to the land. And most importantly begin to shift our thinking, reinserting ourselves in the large web of life.
Curated by: Lori Harrison
Exhibition Artists: Pooja Pawaskar, Lori Harrison
How Do You
Know The Land?
Pooja Pawaskar
Trees have the potential to provide direct connection between us and nature. Throughout the ages and in many of the world’s mythologies, trees have held deep and sacred meaning. They live among us in our everyday lives. We pass them on the city streets, breathe in their oxygen on forest hikes, and harvest their wood for a myriad of necessities, from toothpicks to construction.
But what of my own relationship with trees, and with the land?
I was fortunate to have many formative experiences communing with nature in my childhood. I grew up on a hobby farm and spent summers on the sandy shores of Round Lake in the upper Ottawa valley, seated on the traditional lands of the Algonquin First Nation. As I grow older, I continue to cultivate a love of nature and I care deeply for the earth.
We are trees. We are the land. We are in a reciprocal relationship with all beings.
Pooja Pawaskar
Lori Harrison
Cigwâtik: King Of The Forest, 2024
Video, 2:05min
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.
— Pat O’Donohue, from “To Learn from Animal Being”
