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 region 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. 

Hawrysio, a Toronto born artist currently living in London, England, will be part of the Summer Visiting Artist Series this July at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, presenting her exhibition I am @ here Alive from July 15-26.

“We encourage the use of the gallery to become a sort of lab for the artists with the potential to show new work, try new installation strategies, experiment and get feedback from our community,” says gallery director Eleanor King. “I’m personally excited about Denise’s work because of how she adeptly moves through media—she engages with material in a way that I really admire.” 

In this online exclusive interview for Visual Arts News, our writer Kaylee Maddison catches up with Hawrysio about her upcoming trip to Halifax and her artistic practice.

KAYLEE MADDISON: You’ve had many exhibitions and residencies all over Canada, but never the East Coast until now. Why did you decide to come to Halifax for this residency?

DENISE HAWRYSIO: I’m surprised it’s taken until this point in my life to get to the Maritimes, and I’m really looking forward to it! NSCAD has long fascinated me as a magnet for interesting things in the art world, so that’s a major draw for me, but I’m also excited about seeing new landscapes and old friends.

KM: Many art schools and universities throughout North America have closed or are contemplating closure of their printmaking departments. How do you hope your work may influence printmaking education and practice? 

DH: I find that interesting because some schools in London, particularly the Royal College of Art, have made big investments in their printmaking departments. My own approach is interdisciplinary and conceptual, both of which are not generally associated with printmaking, but seem to be on the rise within the discipline. My pedagogical approach involves imparting my own belief that, despite its marginalisation over recent decades, print can occupy a important position in contemporary art. We need to extend the theoretical discourse around print media, develop its bespoke processes in conjunction with more ‘industrial’ methods of reproduction, work with new web and digital technology and—perhaps most importantly—push the conceptual borders of ‘the print.’ 

I do see some encouraging signs of a global shift within printmaking as it expands and reinvents itself conceptually and technologically, pushing the area into new, post-modern terrain. The medium’s new identity can be seen in print blogs such as Printfreak, Printeresting, Magical Secrets and Outlaw Prints and Printmakers; in the development of new publications and websites; in the innovative ways print is being explored by artists like Christiane Baumgartner, Tal R, the Chapman Brothers, Xu Bing, Kiki Smith and Julie Mehretu, and at the grassroots level by groups like Drive By Press, Evil Prints, Bikini Press International and The Print Circus.

KM: What do you hope to achieve and get out of your time in Halifax and the residency?

DH: I’ve been working on ideas for a new print installation in my studio in London, and I will continue that process during the residency. I’m interested in questions of control, improvisation and the indeterminate play of meaning that arises through the process of making. This new project will involve a direct and intimate relationship with materials; the procedures of formal decision-making will be tempered with the spontaneity of site-specific mark-making. 

KM: I understand the idea of impression or mark-making in your work embodies more than a technical process?

DH: My intention to continue with imagery saturated in ‘imprint’ (the direct impression of objects or gestures) and ‘touch’ (the direct intervention of the artist) is strengthened by my engagement with critical conceptualism, both as an aesthetic attitude and as a political stance. For me, technique is primarily a means to an end.

KM: What first inspired you to use print as a method of social engagement?

DH: Since my undergraduate days, I have tried to work with print in innovative ways, both materially and in terms of a kind of social engagement developed from the tradition of process art. At Queen’s University, Nick Wade [Hawrysio’s tutor] introduced me to conceptual and social art practice: we took a trip to New York to see the Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim, and his blackboard drawings were hugely influential for me in relation to my printmaking practice. I was also inspired by Beuys’ ideas about art as an ongoing, open-ended process that can be “materialized equally in words, things, images or actions.” 

Other influences were Serialism in music and the visual arts as a way of challenging and expanding traditional notions of composition and control. Sol LeWitt was another early influence—his ideas of machine-made art and the way that “process interested him as much as thinking.”

KM: Where do you find inspiration for the non-art situations in your work and the “construction of events?”

DH: I have a longstanding interest in structural film, in which duration is a critical element. As AL Rees puts it in A History of Experimental Film and Video, “duration reveals perception as an act of becoming rather than as the presentation of what has already become.” I use the etching/print plate like the frame of the camera, but instead of a continuous measuring of light, the plate becomes a method of measuring time and its exposure to movement is revealed through the marks left behind. Mark-making happens all around us, an inescapable part of life. 

]]> https://visualartsnews.ca/2014/07/the-marks-left-behind/feed/ 0 https://visualartsnews.ca/2014/03/in-pursuit-of-everyday-knowledge/ https://visualartsnews.ca/2014/03/in-pursuit-of-everyday-knowledge/#respond Sun, 02 Mar 2014 03:34:40 +0000 http://visualartsnews.ca/?p=1762

Food collected at a Parisian Farmers’ market during Katie Belcher’s residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

In our second installment of Current Conditions and Forecasts: Interviews with Atlantic Canadian Artists, Eryn Foster interviews Halifax-based artist Katie Belcher. From conducting research with a charcutier to meeting a composer in Spain who taught her how to translate music into a visual form, Belcher divulges how spending a year in Europe has influenced her approach to art-making.

Eryn Foster: You have recently returned to Halifax after a year of living abroad. Where did you go and what kind of art-related work did you get up to?

Katie Belcher: I spent most of the year in artist residencies across France and Spain, and also traveled to Belfast for my exhibition at Queen Street Studios. With a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, I first spent my first four months in a studio at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. I also received funding from Arts Nova Scotia and this allowed me to dedicate the year entirely to my practice. I worked on drawing projects, gathered material for future work, visited collections and locations that inspire my practice and discussed ideas with artists, writers and musicians.

EF: While you were in Paris, were you working on a specific project?

KB: I was working on two large-scale drawings in charcoal, titled, Farm collapsing (Ferme s’écroulant). As I pursued my research in Paris—specifically markets, still life, culinary and historical processes and cultural memory—the drawings I worked on in the studio were very much a continuation of my previous rural-inspired drawings. Although my intended project for Paris had to do withcultural memory in general, my experience living there shifted my research to be more specifically related to culinary history and food culture.

EF: Can you talk a bit more about how your time in Europe influenced or changed your practice?

KB: Before I left Halifax, I was on the verge of a shift in my practice, but with little time to dedicate to the studio, this shift was very subtle and slow. The time to focus on my work in a new environment definitely gave me the chance to do this. I found that problems I had been facing in the studio over a few years, were solved easily, when I had the time to think, and space to make. I continued to seek out the critiques and discussions of peers and colleagues, and the communal artist residencies gave me that. In showing my work to new audiences, I came face to face with something crucial to my practice. My highly physical drawing method is evident in the drawing itself. I received comments in Paris and Belfast that my drawings were energetic and dramatic. In my studio in Paris, and at my exhibition of In time’s furrows (Queen Street Studios, Belfast, Northern Ireland), viewers saw fires and floods and disaster, where I had intended to show a quiet destruction of a farm property. It was an eye opener.

The people I met have definitely impacted my work. In Paris, I met an Australian artist who had a nearly archaeological approach to her work. This strategy helped me tackle a particularly chaotic period in a new project. Also in France, I had the opportunity to work with a charcutier, who provided me with a drawing subject. In Spain I met a composer who pointed me in the direction of graphic scores. These shifts were key in the development of my newest project.

EF: I’d like to hear more about what kind of work you undertook with the charcutier.

KB: I was offered a day’s lesson from Philippe Medal at Aux Délices de Caylus, a charcutier, and caterer. This was just for fun, but I jumped at the chance, given my research into historical and culinary processes. Philippe invited me back to work with him once a week, as much to improve my French as to teach me to make a béchamel and de-bone a duck. When he saw my drawings of feathers fused with other textures, he gave me a pheasant to pluck and prepare. I think it was in part to tease me for my ineptitude with French cooking, but also to give me a physical subject. I documented the process, which I performed in the garden of DRAWinternational.

Since then, the drawings I am doing are based on my awkward, inexpert actions of plucking. This informs the basis of my new project, and serves as the test run for a drawing methodology that stems from performing a historical process.

EF: Why are you interested in performing a historical process? Does it serve a purpose or is it more about performance itself?

KB: I perform these historical processes to learn, to escape the cerebral, to examine my own lack of material knowledge, and to develop a drawing gesture; but this action is a performance itself.

My oeuvre as a whole relies on my depiction of domestic and agricultural practices and spaces, disused objects and animal specimens to engage with the broader concepts of memory and cultural knowledge. As a part of the generation that came of age in this “Knowledge Economy,” I question my own lack of everyday knowledge. Unlike my grandparents and their peers, I have little understanding of basic agricultural, building, culinary, mechanistic and medical processes. My drawing practice stems from the examination of these formerly everyday activities that to me are so unfamiliar.

In response to drawing in gallery spaces and to comments from a number of peers, I’m recognizing that there is a performance inherent in my drawings. Unwilling for the moment to draw publicly, I’ve spent the last few years bumping up against this acknowledgement. I’ve come to understand that the performance is in the enacting of the historical process itself, and so the energetic drawing that comes out of that carries a performative quality. The more I dig into this more phenomenological project, the more questions I have, and I revel in that.

Katie Belcher depicted alongside her wall drawing at Queen Street Studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2013.

EF: You mentioned meeting a composer who directed you towards the idea of working with graphic scores. Can you explain what a graphic score is and how it might find its way into your drawing practice?

KB: After plucking the pheasant and developing a number of drawing gestures surrounding that process, I became interested in scoring my drawing, as if it were a historical instruction, or a piece of music. When I discussed this with Veronika Krausas, a composer I met in Spain (at Can Serrat International Art Center), she said, Katie, these exist! The right musician will be able to follow it. It was a turning point in the project. Graphic scores are the representation of music in a visual form, without the use of traditional music notation. I’m currently developing a drawn notation, in effect scoring the process for my own large-scale drawings, and facilitating its interpretation in other art forms.

EF: You have just started working as the Director of the artist-run centre in Halifax, Eyelevel Gallery. How has the transition been from full-time artist to full-time administrator? How do you think this position will affect, influence and direct how you make art for the next few years?

KB: The transition has been a bit wild. I started at Eyelevel the morning after flying in from Europe, and it has been a particularly busy fall getting my feet under me. I know I’ll have limited time for my own practice, but my hope to use that time wisely. After this year, I have so much content to work through, I feel like dedicated bursts in the studio could work well at this stage in my practice. I also have a lot of reading and research to do about one particular part of a new drawing project, so I’m hoping to make good use of time outside of the studio too.

The creativity of this job [at Eyelevel] and the challenge of learning something new keeps me actively engaged in art, but I do often wonder if it would be less draining on my creativity to work in a different field. For the next few years, I am gladly taking on the challenge. One thing I learned during my time in Europe, was that wherever you go, you meet yourself. I faced many of the same challenges in getting studio work going. If being a full-time artist didn’t solve those problems, then maybe full-time work isn’t to blame either! This is just the continuation of these lessons. What gets in my way, and how can I work around it?

Artist Annie Macmillan takes the public swimming at Halifax’s “Little Lakes” during her Fieldwork residency. Photo: Katie McKay

This summer as part of the Fieldwork residency project—a series of residencies in the HRM this summer for artists who “employ research methodologies and fieldwork practices generally associated with the natural and social sciences”—artist Annie Macmillan is seeking out every lake in the Halifax Regional Municipality with the name “Little Lake” and swimming its perimeter. Her plan is to turn those maps into drawings that tell the story of each swim. In this interview for Visual Arts News, Veronica Simmonds catches up with her to talk about her underwater adventures, her artistic process and her exploration of a city’s edges.

Join Macmillan as she leads her next public swim, Wednesday August 7.

Photos by Katie McKay
Podcast Music:

Apparat- Sayulita
Air- Alone in Kyoto
Yann Tiersen – Till the End