Weathering & Disturbance
June 23 - August 13, 2023
Presented in the group exhibition What is Welcome? curated by Melanie O’Brian, Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Using sculpture, sound and text, Holly Schmidt’s installation Weathering (2023) connects to her Belkin Outdoor Art residency Vegetal Encounters (2019-23) to test assumptions of where learning takes place and how plant ecologies can be seen as collaborative survival models for living on a damaged planet. As the first plant to grow following a disturbance, Schmidt works with fireweed as a concept for regeneration. Marking the fissures between landscape and architecture, facsimiles of fireweed fashioned from papier-mâché speak of connections and resilience. Visitors are invited to climb the scaffolding to the gallery's clerestory windows to look out at meadows that claim an alternate use of land to that of the manicured spaces across campus. Diurnal sounds from the nearby UBC farm permeate the space of the gallery.
The source for the sound component comes from recordings made through the Long-Term Biodiversity Monitoring Program at UBC Farm. This program ensures that the diversity of life at the farm, including birds, plants and insects, is recorded and monitored for how biodiversity on campus is changing over time and how this affects important ecosystems. The artist is grateful to Matthew Mitchell, Research Associate at UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems for selecting recordings that reveal the cycles of animal life and weather conditions of a summer day from dawn to dusk, with special thanks to Joshua Stevenson for sound editing.
Drawn from the archives of the UBC Herbarium at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, Disturbance traces the locations where fireweed specimens have been collected across the region. Working with Linda Jennings, the Herbarium collections curator, Schmidt selected and transposed notations from Beaty specimen labels that describe the sites and conditions where the plants were found. The method of notation begins with hand-written entries and shifts across time to the present-day familiarity of standardized fonts. Bringing to light the tenacity and persistence of fireweed in disturbed landscapes, the running line of text on paper stretches the height of the gallery.
Photo Credit: Rachel Topham