About

This project weaves together First Nation gathering traditions, early settler agricultural methods and contemporary environmental art practices, through shared investigations for urban cloth production.

Our physical labour will be assisted, witnessed and transformed into a choreographed dance with community members. Together we will examine labour and ritual, as they are linked through intention, concentration, and repetition. The local urban cloth produced will become  site specific installations on the land from which the fibres grow. The installation created through studied and practiced movement; and danced upon the landscape.

Terroir means  a sense of place.

It is the sum of the effects that the local environment; geography, geology and climate, can have on a product created from the land. In wine making, Terroir refers to the land imparting a unique quality to the grapes grown specific to that growing site.

So, what are the plants that grow here for fibre?

How does the soil and environment affect both tended crops and discovered plants? And, what is the cloth we can weave from this place, can these diverse threads weave a new Social Fabric?

Working with lands both post-industrial or post- consumer as well as in community gardens, we will animate these places with slow, close observation, harvesting and processing of the plants. Community participants engaged in each level of the knowledge exchange sharing in the learning process.

The land provides the cloth, but is also the loom that weaves us together in our shared purpose of discovery.

Informed by the history of the land and the plants that grow there, we will collectively sow/forage/harvest/spin/dance and weave a hybrid cloth of this place. The land becomes both participant and forum for discussing our overlapping histories and perspectives.