Anita Cazzola’s “Botanical Reclamation” residency with the City of Guelph will culminate in an outdoor textile installation on the former Ontario Reformatory lands. Between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox, Anita has built relationships and gently harvested 22 local plant species to create 38 different natural dyes, resulting in hundreds of shades of “locally coloured” textiles. Her goal has been to use natural dyes as a way of amplifying the voices of plants growing in unconventional, “Curious”, spaces around Guelph. Both these spaces, and the plants that dwell within them, deserve our care and appreciation for all that they can teach us: resilience, reciprocity, trans-conditional love, patience, persistence, and generative disobedience.
Anita has built a body of work using these naturally dyed textiles that take their form as flags – emblems of plants’ reclamation of space. They will be situated within the former agricultural fields at the OR lands, and will speak to the multifaceted transformation and labour that this land has witnessed.
Community members are welcomed to engage with and reflect upon this work during daylight hours on October 23-24 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Exhibition Events:
1. Opening Celebration:
Saturday, October 23 from 2-4 p.m.
Registration required through Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/178172969147
2. In-The-Round Community Conversation “On plants, resilience, and craft:”
Sunday, October 24 from 10-11 a.m.
Registration required through Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/176767234557
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