By: Maya Barillas Mohan, Staff Writer
On May 28, a curated tour and a literary exhibition opened up on the third floor of WAC Bennett Library. The Peak reached out to those responsible for a collaborative interview over email with associate professor at the School of Contemporary Arts, Denise Oleksijcuk, and PhD student Salena Wiener, to learn more about the tour and its related collection, Earth Love: Intended Chiefly for Young Persons.
The two curators told us they “got along right away” because they are both avid readers. They’re also “drawn to writers that encourage us to imagine a future in which women form inclusive, heterogeneous, matriarchal societies that work together to heal the Earth and, in doing so, support all the living beings that depend on it for their survival.” Oleksijczuk has spent time researching in the Special Collections and Rare Books section at the library, and in turn encouraged her students to use the library for their own projects. Wiener also professed affection, having “encountered the library’s rare book collections and its excellent staff through work as a research assistant and [her own] doctoral research.”
Earth Love “investigates botanical art and ideas in historical and contemporary art from a decolonial perspective,” through a collection of books and paintings, Oleksijczuk said.
The climate crisis has influenced gardening to shift away from the design of wealthy estate gardens toward smaller, more environmentally sustainable practices of cultivation.”
— Denise Oleksijcuk, curator of Earth Love
This could be seen at X̱wáýx̱way (Stanley Park), where educator and ethnobotanist, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss’s garden aims to redevelop traditional Indigenous stewardship. Once, third grade children from wək̓ʷan̓əs tə syaqʷəm Elementary School in East Vancouver were taken on a field trip to paint in the open air, and then these works were then displayed alongside books by Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Involving children in garden art seems to be done to encourage them to “use the knowledge that they gain from them to cultivate a closer relationship with the more-than-human beings with which we share the Earth,” the curators said. Wiener told me that her interests in women’s botanical literature “immediately gelled” with the opportunity for children to “experience nature in an embodied, educational way.”
“Contemporary life for children and adults is becoming increasingly divorced from the natural world,” the curators said. Recovering lost words from our disconnections from nature could be mediated by introducing books by Indigenous gardeners, “who use the names from their own languages of traditional native plants in their publications.” The books displayed were chosen for qualities like “resistance against the colonial project of homogenization (simplifying complex Indigenous identities into one umbrella classification), heteropatriarchy (the concentration of power in cisgender, heterosexual men), and environmental destruction.” Other works more simply describe the practice of gardening as a means of strengthening community bonds.
The curators told The Peak that within a desire for community, the project’s focus on women’s writing and visual art helps “shed light on the depth and breadth of their knowledge of plants as they relate to connectedness to the land.” A goal of Earth Love is to “cultivate a closer relationship with the more-than-human-beings with which we share the Earth.” Committing oneself to part of a “larger environmentalist movement” evokes community. The exhibit exemplifies its name: “an anti-nationalist concept of humans as Earthlings, who work together to protect the planet from destruction.”
