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The Meadow Network Issue #4 will be released this week as a part of our contribution to the exhibition Dig Up My Heart: Artistic Practice in the Field presented at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island. Dig Up My Heart brings together a group of practitioners who start from the same impulse – a visceral connection to the land and to place, and the transformative potential of that attachment in response to issues of landscape change. Combining art with social practice, at the heart of the creative approaches is the desire to reconcile personal, poetic, and political, working critically and responsively to experiences in primarily rural contexts. Representing a diversity of distinctive forms of “fieldwork,” they offer powerful narratives that connect local sites to global change through a broad range of entwined concerns. Artists and Artist Collectives: Alice Angus (London), Michael Alstad and Leah Lazariuk (Toronto), Brenda Whiteway (Charlottetown), Matthew Moore (Phoenix), Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell (Oakland), Rural Studio (Auburn), Rural Psychogeography (various), DodoLab (Waterloo). The exhibition runs from For more information on the exhibition, please visit www.confederationcentre.com. To create this issue of the Meadow Network, we asked Shauna McCabe, the curator of the exhibition, to put us in touch with people from the island who had “left” it, We wanted to interview those who moved away, to cities across Canada or abroad. We were curious about what they remembered and held onto about the communities and culture of the island. What traditions, memories, or customs had they “held” onto? Working entirely through email, what emerged was a range of reflections on a home with hard boundaries (indeed, what boundaries are more fixed than those of an island). From these beginnings, a range of exits and movements unfolded; those stories are told in the pages of the newest newspaper in the Meadow Network seires. You can download a copy of the issue shortly. |
