From left to right: Jasmine Cardenas Obando and Jennie Suddick from the International Programs and Collaboration Office with residency artists Zwena Gray, Cat Bluemke, Sabīne Šnē, Eugenia Castillo and Caroline McCaw. Photo by Hyun Bin Moon.
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By Deanne Fisher, OCAD U Vice-Provost, International & Students
As scientific consensus on climate change grows but meaningful progress lags, artists are stepping forward to raise awareness and drive action. Artist residencies, in particular, have emerged as vital spaces for sustainable practice — laboratories where new ways of relating to the earth can be imagined, tested and shared.
This September, OCAD University’s Global Centre for Climate Action welcomed five artists for a two-week residency on the Toronto Islands. Just a 15-minute ferry ride from Toronto’s downtown core, the Islands provided a unique environment to explore human and more-than-human relationships.
Generously supported by BMO, the inaugural Creative Climate Action Residency took place at the Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, bringing together artists from Latvia, Spain, New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada.
They were joined by visiting artists, designers and practitioners, including Jana Macalik, director of OCAD U’s Global Centre for Climate Action; Nadia McLaren, filmmaker, visual artist and current MFA student at OCAD U; and artist and educator Cole Swanson, whose work explore relations between nature and culture.
Though their practices span from storytelling to machine learning to embodied pedagogy, the residency artists shared much in common — their collective powers of observation, deep listening, care and curiosity wove a thread between the works they developed while on the Islands.
Residency participant and artist Zwena Gray, originally from Detroit and now based in Peterborough, is a storyteller and community cultivator who leads hikes informed by queer ecology—an approach that challenges binary, heteronormative ways of understanding the natural world.
On the Islands, Gray invited participants to experience hiking differently. “The hike is consent-based,” they explain. “And it is buffet style. You participate in what you want. There’s no pressure of speed or distance.”
Gray’s hikes emphasize accessibility, relationship-building and embodied healing, aiming to “somatically move trauma through the body.” During the residency, Gray began documenting their practice and creating an archive of queer ecology artifacts to make the framework more accessible.
Eugenia Castillo, from Spain, used her time during the residency to explore the potential of the Island’s own materials. Her work often engages traditional techniques that answer many of the challenges of climate change, such as ceramics that purify water or natural materials that cool buildings.
“We are losing touch with what’s available to us, some of the intelligence from the past,” she explains. On the Toronto Islands, Castillo spent many hours foraging for resources, eventually discovering some small clay deposits that she processed, shaped and fired into durable material. “I tried to really know the Island, and to know what is available here.”
Caroline McCaw, an artist, designer and professor at Otego Polytechnic in New Zealand, describes her work as social practice rooted in “generous, open conversations.” She was particularly influenced by McLaren’s visit: “I learned from Nadia that the way to make change is not through fear, but through joy.”
Her work is embodied, emphasizing “repositioning yourself toward the earth.” On the Islands, she explored the idea of “laking”—treating the word lake as a verb, something you do. “When you swim in a lake, it is joy,” she said.
Her days were spent sketching the shifting edges of the Islands and making small booklets that recorded encounters with grass, ants and fish. As a professor at a New Zealand university, she incorporates similar practices into her pedagogy, encouraging students to connect with nature in visceral, embodied ways.
A multidisciplinary artist from Riga in Latvia, Sabīne Šnē worked primarily with sound during the residency.
“Sound is something that is always around us, but listening takes time, attention, presence and openness of the senses,” said Šnē. “With this work I wanted to explore how listening can help me tune in to Lake Ontario and how, by noticing it as a marvellous place full of organisms and their voices, we might learn to appreciate it more and take better care of it.”
Collecting field recordings across the Islands, including underwater, she created layered soundscapes that ask: “In a world full of noise, how can listening help us create more inclusive ways of living for both humans and more-than-humans?”
For Šnē, “listening is a kind of resistance. It builds another world where more-than-humans have a place in human-made hierarchies.” Šnē’s past work is primarily in visual digital media, so the opportunity to foreground sound represented a shift in what drives the work.
Photo collage, from left to right: Caroline McCaw, photo by Hyun Bin Moon; Eugenia Castillo shows her work to OCAD U faculty member Cheryl Giraudy, photo by Hyun Bin Moon; Sabīne Šnē and Zwena Gray, photo by Hyun Bin Moon; Zwena Gray leads an ecology hike, photo by Jennie Suddick.
Cat Bluemke, based in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, also works at the intersection of technology and art.
“There's something perfect about the unique rural-urban environment of the Toronto Islands for tackling these questions around climate action and digital technologies,” she said. “Being surrounded by water but still connected to the city creates this interesting in-between space that feels appropriate for the questions I’m pursuing.”
For five years, Bluemke has explored machine learning and AI-driven creativity, most recently through her project GAN of Living Skies.
Training a machine to generate landscapes from thousands of images, Bluemke highlights both the playfulness and subversiveness of AI. Highly aware of the energy demands of machine learning, Bluemke’s project has a twist — it is powered by a small solar panel.
“The machine essentially learns by probabilities,” she explains. “It’s a form of beyond-human intelligence.” Bluemke has taken the project across Canada, from Dawson City’s long summer days to Toronto’s waterfront, where she trained her system with tens of thousands of new images.
The residency was organized by OCAD U’s International Programs and Collaboration team, with facilitators Jasmine Cardenas and Jennie Suddick developing their own work while on site with the artists.
On Sept. 20, the Creative Climate Action Residency culminated with an open studio showcase, coinciding with 25th anniversary of Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, engaging visitors in the questions raised by the artists and their work.
Thank you to BMO for generously supporting the Climate Change Residency.
