Public Engagement Art
When Looking Becomes Participating
I love creating art and experiences that invite people a little closer. Sometimes participants make marks, tell stories, move, write, or help create the work itself. Sometimes participation is quieter, pausing beneath a tree, entering a guided meditation, listening to a story, looking through another being’s eyes, or considering our own place within the living world.
For me, public engagement begins when we move from simply observing something to entering into relationship with it. Not all participation leaves a mark on the artwork. Sometimes the mark is what the experience leaves on us.
The projects below have taken many different forms—collaborative art, exhibitions, storytelling, garden gatherings, contemplative walks and invitations to wonder—but each asks, in its own way: What happens when we become part of the conversation?
Sweetness of Circles — at the Odlum Brown Gallery, Chilliwack Cultural Centre
Art made in relationship
Created collaboratively with artist Tracie Stewart, Sweetness of Circles grew through a series of shared encounters with people, places, water, trees, creatures, seasons and the more-than-human world. Participants have gathered in forests, gardens, galleries and other places to move, listen, meditate, draw, wonder and create together. The resulting work carries traces of those encounters forward.
Here, art is not simply something we make about the living world. It becomes one way of entering into conversation with it.
Future Memoria — at the Surrey Art Gallery
A garden enters the gallery
The PLOT Community Sharing Garden was invited into Future Memoria, a group exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery exploring how we imagine our collective future. I have always thought of the PLOT as a kind of living artwork, a place shaped over years by gardening, food, creativity, ceremony, conversation, care, and all the people who have wandered through its gates.
Bringing the PLOT into the gallery offered another kind of invitation. Visitors were asked to imagine: What kinds of communities and futures might we choose to grow? That question travelled between gallery and garden through wishes, handmade capes, performances, workshops, shared art-making—and eventually all the way back into the soil.
Loon and Moon — at the Terrace Art Gallery
A story that invites us in
Created with visual artist Tracie Stewart, Loon and Moon is an illustrated allegory exploring belonging, relationship, transformation, and our connection with the living world. Through readings, conversations, guided meditation, and participatory workshops, the story moves beyond the page and invites people to bring their own questions, memories, and imagination into the experience.
The story begins with Loon and Moon. Where it goes next depends a little on who enters it
Braiding Ways of Knowing — at Darts Hill Garden
An invitation into relationship with Cedar
Created with Tracie Stewart for the Panoply exhibition at Darts Hill Garden, Braiding Ways of Knowing explored relationship with Western Red Cedar. Rather than asking visitors only to look at the work, we invited them to stop. Stand at the bend in the road. Take a breath of forest. Look softly in four directions. Notice.
What do you see? Smell? Hear? Feel? Remember?
There was nothing to make and nothing to leave behind. The participation was simply in the noticing, in meeting a place, a tree, and the more-than-human world with a little more care and curiosity than perhaps we had a few moments before.
Newton Medicine Wheel
Ceremony as community participation
For many years, the Newton Medicine Wheel has been one of the places at the PLOT closest to my heart. I had the great privilege of learning alongside Cree Elder Grandma Amy Eustergerling—Earthworm Woman—who created and cared for the Medicine Wheel and became a beloved teacher and mentor to me.
The Wheel has long been a sacred gathering place. We have come together there to mark the solstices and equinoxes, share food, music, stories and teachings, place stones, reflect, grieve, celebrate, and reconnect with one another and the living world. After Grandma Amy died, I was honoured to help carry these seasonal traditions forward in the spirit in which she taught them, while continuing to welcome many cultures, generations, and ways of knowing into the circle.
Perhaps this is public engagement in one of its oldest forms: Gather. Listen. Share. Remember. Become part of the circle.
The PLOT Community Sharing Garden
A garden people make together
The PLOT has taught me that public engagement does not always begin with an artwork. Sometimes it begins with a piece of land and the question: What could we grow here together?
Over the years, the PLOT has become much more than a community garden. People have come to grow and harvest food, tend garden beds, share meals, make art, celebrate the seasons, listen to music and poetry, learn from one another, and sometimes simply find a welcoming place to sit. Children, elders, families, newcomers, artists, gardeners, people with plenty and people going through difficult times have all entered through the same garden gate.
For me, the PLOT is a kind of living public artwork—never finished, continually shaped by the people who participate, and rooted in the idea that community itself is something we can tend.
Growing Community Through Gathering
Sometimes the art is bringing people together
Some of my public engagement work has been wonderfully ordinary: set up some tables, find the craft supplies, organize the food, invite the musicians, make sure everyone knows where to go—and then watch a community gathering come alive.
Over the years at the PLOT, I have helped organize celebrations for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Earth Day, the solstices and equinoxes, community meals, music and poetry gatherings, garden work parties, art-making, children’s activities and many other reasons for people to come together.
What interests me is not simply the event itself, but what happens between people once they arrive. Someone brings food.
Someone teaches a child to plant. Someone reads a poem. Someone who arrived alone finds someone to talk to.
Sometimes public engagement really is as simple, and as complicated, as creating the conditions for connection.
The Thread Through It All
When I look back at these projects, they appear wonderfully different from one another. A gallery exhibition. A garden. A story. A tree. A Medicine Wheel. A room full of people making marks together.
But I think I keep returning to the same thing. I am interested in creating places where people can participate rather than simply observe—where we can become a little more curious about one another, about where we are, and about the many lives with which we share this world.
Sometimes we make art. Sometimes we tell stories. Sometimes we gather around a fire, walk beneath trees, share food, put on a cape, or sit quietly and listen. The form keeps changing. The invitation is the same: come a little closer.