By Valérie Frappier
Sitting within the protected area of the Mabou Highlands, MacKinnon’s Brook is part of the larger conservation region stretching between the towns of Mabou and Inverness on the western coast of Unama’ki/Cape Breton Island. The Mabou Highlands have earned their protected status thanks to decades-long efforts from community members at the local and provincial levels who rallied to protect the area and its five-kilometre coastline from development. The wilderness site boasts an extensive network of community-created hiking trails, maintained by the Cape Mabou Trail Club, that also cross onto Crown and private lands.
For two consecutive summers, Outdoor School, a critical environmental art platform composed of artist Diane Borsato and curator Amish Morrell, has invited artists to lead a residency in MacKinnon’s Brook where the duo is intermittently based. Morrell was born in Inverness and grew up in Inverness County, and the duo now share their time between Toronto and the Island. Outdoor School initiates collective knowledge-sharing experiences, typically outdoors, that enmesh contemporary art and ecology with the aim of spurring participatory learning about the histories and ecologies of a given site. These projects have ranged from snowshoeing on the frozen Humber River in Toronto to swimming with mathematicians in Banff, as well as countless mushroom forays. Some of these creative outdoor activities have taken the shape of exhibitions, courses, and residencies.
As part of their continued exploration into the spaces where art and ecology meet, Outdoor School curated two residencies as an invitation to artists to explore MacKinnon’s Brook for respective two-week periods of land-based research and exploratory study. American artist Amy Franceschini and Belgian artist Lode Vranken, of the collective Futurefarmers, were residents in August 2023. Most recently, Cape Breton-born, Toronto-based artist Sameer Farooq was artist-in-residence in August 2024.
Artists were hosted in a cottage on the top of a hill off of a dirt road with a view to the west overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence and beyond to Prince Edward Island. Tucked away among the trees, the cottage belongs to David Rumsey, the creator of one of the largest private map collections in the Americas, and his partner, Abby Smith Rumsey, a writer and historian. The American couple have been spending time in MacKinnon’s Brook for several decades and participated in its conservation efforts.
Both Futurefarmers and Farooq were visiting the specific Image courtesy of Sameer Farooq, MacKinnon’s Brook, August 2024region of MacKinnon’s Brook for the first time. Based in the map collector’s cottage, the residents employed their particular artistic approaches to situate themselves in their new surroundings and attune to the network of relationships that make up its ecosystem. After their respective stays, the artists charted their learnings in a double-sided print. Each poster can be read as a type of map of the methods they used to get to know MacKinnon’s Brook, their experiences of doing so, and what they learned about its ecologies.
Resounding (Dis)Orientation
At MacKinnon’s Brook, Futurefarmers extended the collective’s concerns regarding reorienting perceptions of place and of dominant systems that structure human life in relation to nature. Their residency culminated in the participatory work and performance THEN/NOW/HEAR/HERE, where the artists invited the public to experience the environment and trail system they had connected with during their visit, and to create a collective attunement to its elements. On the afternoon of August 13, 2023, a group of approximately forty people—a mix of residents and visitors to the area—gathered at the Mabou Post Road trailhead. The group was led into the vast trail system by Borsato and Morrell, and began the four-kilometre one-way hike into the mountainous terrain, headed toward MacKinnon’s Brook Cove.
The path led the group north, up peaks and down into valleys, through grassy meadows and rocky cliffs, giving way to intermittent vistas of the vast Gulf of St. Lawrence to the west. En route, the artists prompted participants to meditate on their sense of orientation and assigned each participant a cardinal point. Deep into the hike, the group neared the cove and started their descent into the rocky opening, following the river where it meets the ocean. The participants gathered and sat on a grassy cliff ledge looking out toward the water and became spectators to a musical performance taking place below them amongst the rocky crevices.
Interspersed among the cove, Franceschini, Vranken, Borsato, and their collaborators greeted the group perched on rocks. Sounds echoed from large angular foghorns made out of PVC pipes and funnels, wrapped with canvas to resemble floating sails. The group was accompanied by Electro Jacques Therapy, the moniker of Nova Scotia-based violinist Jacques Mindreau, who crouched closer to the rocks to play Petro-Acoustic Signals (2023)—an instrument constructed with Futurefarmers consisting of piano strings screwed taut across rocks.
Throughout the performance, Mindreau played the strings using a violin bow or by plucking them, and alternated by playing a violin. Speakers were embedded throughout the rocks to amplify the sounds, which echoed across the cove and wove themselves with the sounds of the cascading river and the ocean waves lapping up against the shore. An experimental orchestra of human and non-human players alike materialized.
In the resulting print Futurefarmers created, also titled THEN/NOW/HEAR/HERE (2024), the publication opens like a trail map and features snapshots from their experimentations and the public event. In one section subtitled “A Score for Attending to an Ecology of Frequencies,” the artists share the formula they used to orchestrate their eclectic outdoor harmony. Perhaps most revealing in their approach to MacKinnon’s Brook and the encounter they staged is their definition for the term (dis)orientation in their formula: “Imagine the space around you as a field, a conduit, a mesh network, a field of influence upon you, and your influence upon it;”—marking all bodies and elements present as active participants in the work.
Interbeing on Cape Breton
One year later, Farooq arrived in Cape Breton but on the opposite coast of the eastern side where he grew up in Sydney during the 1980s. As he became secluded in MacKinnon’s Brook and studied the natural ecosystem that surrounded him, the focus of his residency turned to encompass relationships at a more foundational level. Farooq brought the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s texts Interbeing and The Other Shore, which guided his contemplations about the relationships sustaining the ecologies of the brook.
Staying in the cabin, he considered the typical methods used to navigate land and the impulse of “trying to turn the unknown into the known” when one creates a map. Instead, Farooq turned to Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist philosophies around the concept of interbeing—how everything is connected and nothing can thrive on its own—in order to map out how the organisms of the lands of MacKinnon’s Brook were in relation to one another.
Farooq explains that his research took on an introspective quality as he employed meditation as his main method to orient himself in his new surroundings.
“A lot of my work is done in meditation,” says Farooq. “So it just felt very natural to evoke those processes again there.”
He describes the residency as becoming one of attentiveness and presence.
“It was literally about looking at the goldenrods and Queen Anne’s lace and their relation to the wind, to really understand the reliance of these plants on these elements,” he says. “It was slow, repetitive work. It was daily meditations, daily walks, a lot of note-taking, a lot of looking, a lot of tending to.”
Farooq developed a glossary to put into words his close observations of how elements were relating to one another, which he visually documented through photography to think through the philosophy of interbeing. Through his reflections, he came to realize that, while in MacKinnon’s Brook, he was “sitting in the basin of all these relationships.” He perceived how all plants and elements of the land, including his presence there, were profoundly interlinked and, ultimately, dependent on each other to exist.
Farooq’s recently completed poster, Bringing Thich Nhat Hanh to Cape Breton (2025), gives a glimpse into this rich network of relationships, as it showcases series of his photographs studying MacKinnon’s Brook. The repetitive images of his subjects horizontally line each side of the poster in grids resembling strips of a film roll. One side captures the progressive rise and fall of the tide in each frame; the other shows the yellow goldenrods overlaid against a cloudy blue sky, the slight movements of the Queen Anne’s lace in the wind, his foot touching the coursing river, a momentous spruce meeting the horizon line and overlapping where the sky and the ocean split in half.
Farooq describes his residency experience at MacKinnon’s Brook alongside his recent exhibition The Fairest Order in the World at Halifax’s Dalhousie Art Gallery in 2023 as turning points in publicly presenting his work in Nova Scotia. These projects have affirmed him not only as a Nova Scotian artist, but as a Cape Breton artist, attesting to how deeply his work is informed by this place.
Farooq relays that the divide between both sides of Cape Breton’s art communities was on his mind when he arrived at MacKinnon’s Brook, specifically the stories that get told or are known about each of them. He referenced the white American artists that came up along the East Coast and settled or spent seasons on the western side of Cape Breton in the 1960s onwards, and how this artistic scene is known much more widely on and off the Island in contrast to the Indigenous or South Asian art he grew up with on the Island.
“I didn’t grow up with Joan Jonas and Richard Serra and Philip Glass,” he says. “I grew up really around a sort of Pakistani and Indian [and broader] South Asian creativity that was brought to the Sydney area, where there were [all] sorts of expressions of creativity—of painting, of sculpture, of mural work—that wasn’t really promoted in this way in the rest of the Island.”
Farooq cites individuals like Pushpa Rathor, a miniature painter and former professor at Cape Breton University; Dr. Khalifa, a medical doctor, gardener, and painter; and his own father, an ophthalmologist, poet, and painter, as a few of his notable artistic influences from his community growing up.
“I’m from part of the Island where South Asian immigrants would come to for work,” says Farooq.
He describes how art wasn’t necessarily promoted as a profession in the Pakistani and Indian communities of Cape Breton during his formative years, though everyone in his community harboured artistic expression and these featured prominently at gatherings and parties—be it through poetry, music, or visual art.
“There was just such a deep, deep respect and appreciation for arts among the community that raised me on the Island,” he says. “A culture of practice that looks very different than what Nova Scotia collects and promotes.”
Coming back to the Island as an artist for the residency in MacKinnon’s Brook helped Farooq harmonize the gulf between both coasts and also redefine his sense of belonging to Cape Breton. He gave an artist talk at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts to conclude his residency, the first artist talk he’s given in his home province, where members of the art community from both sides of the Island gathered.
“There was a real sense of homecoming. I think people understood very much where I was coming from in my projects as being one of our own, in a way.”
These stories of disorientation and interbeing while in residence, about the art communities on both coasts, help to attune to the rich and complex histories as well as inheritances of Cape Breton’s broader arts ecology. Perhaps what they all have in common is the land on which they practice, how the coastal lands and environment of the Island influence their practices and gather them in its basin of relationships.
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