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Glacier, Plaza, and Garden by Dr. Cynthia Hammond

Ecological collaboration and didacticism in three Canadian landscapes

Peer-reviewed article by Dr. Cynthia Hammond

Sustainability. Special issue: “Eco-Didactic Art, Design, and Architecture in the Public Realm”, eds Carmela Cucuzzella, Jean-Pierre Chupin, and Cynthia Hammond. Vol. 13 (May 2021): 1-19. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5729 

Marlene Creates reading site-specific poetry in The Boreal Poetry Garden for the UN International Year of Forests, 4 September 2011. Photo: Don McKay. September 2011. Marlene Creates reading site-specific poetry in The Boreal Poetry Garden for the UN International Year of Forests, 4 September 2011. Photo: Don McKay. September 2011.

In this essay, Hammond explores three recent Canadian artworks that each engage with a different landscape: Requiem for a Glacier by artist and composer Paul Walde (2013); the Urban Prairie designed by landscape architects Claude Cormier + Associés (2012); and The Boreal Poetry Garden by visual artist Marlene Creates (born 2005-). By analyzing these artists’ and designers’ creative strategies in relation to these landscapes, Hammond delves into the question of ecological collaboration in each project, and explores the ways in which the non-human aspects of the landscape do, or do not, take centre stage. In so doing, this essay has a second aim: to explore the extent to which, in performing a didactic relationship with their sites, these three projects contribute to an activist and pedagogical ethos around climate change, habitat, and ecology.




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