Tri-City Series

for the

Arts Sector to Address Climate Anxiety

Hamilton | KINGSTON | MONTREAL

A SERIES OF THREE UNIQUE EVENTS THAT EXPLORED THE WAYS PARTICIPATORY ARTS PRACTICES CAN BE USED TO ADDRESS CLIMATE ANXIETY

In Canada, introducing arts+climate practice at the community level is scarce. This project aims to fill this gap

Each One Day Symposium Featured

  • Indigenous and non-indigenous artist led sessions where participants from both the arts and environmental sectors engaged creative practices to build hope, stewardship and resilience in the face of climate change in discussing the development of artistic strategies to generate strength, channel grief, and build solidarity.
  • Through beadwork, visual arts, sound, installation, movement and dance, participants reflected on and explored the two driving questions collectively.
  • Together, participants shared ideas on arts-central resiliency approaches and artistic practices that support community climate resiliency and enhance appreciation for, and application of, the arts in a climate-changing society.

Hamilton, Kingston & Montreal

THE PROCESS

87 Participants across the 3 Symposiums spend a day collectively exploring the two driving questions:

To what degree can Canada’s arts-sector play a role in addressing the growing levels of climate change anxiety being experienced within communities?

What methodologies and artistic practices can be deployed to generate climate hope, nature and water stewardship, and build community resilience?

At The Cotton Factory

Hamilton, ON

Angela DeMontigny led a season incorporating glass beading.

Sharing a meal as we discuss the driving questions.

The group included those operating in the arts and culture sector as well as environmental

“We can re-envision places in the city within the solar punk future of urban renewal, climate harmony, community cooperation.”

“It’s important for young folks to be able to envision a better future than the one that we’re leaving them.”

Christina Popescu led the afternoon through movement and collective sharing.

“What changes the culture is that people and city staff need to be able to see the thing that you’re trying to do. And in a visual medium, art lets you do that.”

“I think capitalistic forces are so strong nowadays, but art and compassion and the emotions and the true feelings that art can express can definitely overcome that strength of capitalism and that capitalistic ideology. I think art and the artwork that people make can definitely work to help bring people together and, in that way, help address the climate change anxiety that’s prevalent in our world now.”

The Tett Centre Creativity

Kingston, ON

Sessions were led by Andy Berg and Lindsay Brant, with support from Sunny Kerr.

While we worked collectively, there was also space and time embedded for individual contemplation.

Sunny Kerr shares his insights on the driving questions while preparing installation materials.

Andy Berg brought in drift wood and materials used for the temporary installation outside the Tett Centre.

“We need to connect with our community because there’s more ownership when you know it’s impacting you and your life and your family or your school. Ownership is a great.”

“We’re really making an effort to specifically focus a lot of our programming on marginalized communities to build that voice and make sure that they feel represented and a part of our larger community as a whole.”

Lindsay Brant and Jay Havens.

As part of the Kingston finale, we worked to build the installation that came through our discussions on the driving questions.

“So, I think, as an artist, I was able to engage people, people didn’t really want to talk about how climate change was affecting the lake, but they were interested in making art. So as long as I brought that tool of art making into the mix I was able to engage people in the conversation because it was with the art there, it became more, it became less intimidating and fearful. What I realized was that there were many people that don’t even understand still.”

“I think artists, an artist role would be to use their tools to help people reconnect, because we’ve lost, we’ve lost the connection we become disconnected from all of the, our natural environment.”

Université du Québec à Montréal

Montreal, QC

Sessions were hosted by several facilitators including Helena Vallée-Dallaire, Valérie Ivy Hamelin, and Anne Deslauriers to name a few

Participants are invited to draw onto the projection of a landscape that they have analyzed, felt, and investigated, in a workshop led by Marie-Pierre Labrie and Anne Deslauriers, professors at the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM.

Interdisciplinary artist Anne Isabelle Léonard guides participants in addressing directly their eco-anxiety in writing, and listening to their body.

Movement artist and phD student in social psychology Cristina Popescu brings participants outside to move and release tensions.

“We (artists) need a more major role in these decision-making processes in like the community engagement processes.”

“We (arts institutions) are now working with seniors and we work with public health and all kinds of different organizations in the city where we use art as a tool for learning, engagement, creation, conversation, sharing. And through all that we hope that it changes perspective, it brings people together, and it encourages community participation.”

Simon Goulet-Tinaoui, PhD student in psychology,  leads a group session on eco-anxiety.

Participants discuss during a group writing session, led by the ÉCLORE team.

“I feel like compassion, just the word compassion, I feel like is more reflective of humanity’s true nature.”

“Methodologies, it’s like, slower, and longer, and deeper, a little bit more open, in the sense that you’re trying to create a space and a time. But then the rest of it is a little bit, you know, like, let’s see what people arrive with. And knowing that, yeah, your final objectives, you know, need to be flexible, because it’s not so much about trying to just sort of meet what you think your needs are, but be able to hear and respond to the collective needs.”

“I think artists are able to interpret scientific data into more relatable information. Science usually is all words and an artist can say something with one picture where it would take thousands of words.”

“We can embrace what we have. We can immerse ourselves in nature and look to natural histories that have proven that there are ways for sustainability.”

“It could be much more about what the group explores and what they learn from each other, what they, what relationships develop and deepen, what kind of infrastructures people get introduced to, different ways of, you know, taking partnerships forward, taking, finding new, new kind of avenues for exhibition.”

“Working through the arts or experiencing some type of art event, it can be visual, it can be physical, it can be spatial, gives anybody an opportunity to see things through a different lens.”

“I think that what art can do, and what artists can do, is help reframe the vocabulary, the terminology, to come up with solutions using words that are more helpful when we describe and talk about the situation that the planet is facing right now, that perhaps the dialogue is reframed.”

“Working through the arts or experiencing some type of art event, it can be visual, it can be physical, it can be spatial, gives anybody an opportunity to see things through a different lens.”

“I think that there is a way through artistic expression to bring that connectivity together, to bring people back into themselves, to look at humans as our best friends as opposed to our worst enemies and working together collaboratively with hope, with the knowledge that the planet will survive.”

“I feel that some kind of personal practice needs to be cultivated with respect to actually unplugging from all forms of media and also unplugging from the capitalist project. I think that there needs to be some kind of social resistance to the status quo.”

“In the recognition of a reality of interdependencies at the foundation of all living things. In this way, the arts can make these interdependencies their main material and help teach us to approach reality between living beings, human and non-human, in a more humble and intimate way, and to explore other ways of doing things that are mutually more fulfilling.”

Thank You

Waterlution would like to thank all participants for taking the time to come together with us in exploring and sharing such positive arts-central resiliency approaches and artistic practices.

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Christopher McLeod

Multidisciplinary social practice artist, educator and researcher.

Hamilton and Kingston

He has a BA in Studio Art from McMaster University and an MFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC. His work has been featured at Nuit Blanche Toronto, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and at Supercrawl 2018 and 2019. He has taught at McMaster University, Dundas Valley School of Art, and was Artist in Residence for 2 years at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. He is leader of the Great Art for Great Lakes project, commissioning artists and artists teams on 17 participatory based public art projects. Christopher investigates community engagement through art as a way of knowing, problem solving, healing and transforming our relationship with water. 

Angela DeMontigny

An award winning Cree/Métis designer and artist.

Hamilton

Angela DeMontigny is an award winning Cree/Métis designer and artist whose designs present a contemporary side of lndigenous art and culture to the world while honouring her ancestors. Her art and designs are a modern reclamation of culture and identity as well as a means to educate people about lndigenous knowledge and worldviews. A trailblazer and pioneer of lndigenous luxury fashion for over two decades, her original collections have graced runways around the world. She is a passionate advocate for sustainability and slow fashion and follows these principles throughout her design process. Angela is also known for being a tierce auntie and offers her time as a mentor and supporter of lndigenous women entrepreneurs and young designers in her community. Always looking for new ways to create, she is becoming just as well known for her gorgeous lndigenous wellness products under the brand LODGE Soy Candies. She acknowledges that her ability to create beautiful, intentional scents using essential oils from lndigenous plants comes from ancestral knowledge channelled through her grandmothers. Helping others is important to her and something she strives for in everything she does. 

Also an accomplished artist, Angela was awarded a major public art commission in 2020 for her groundbreaking ‘Ali Our Relations’ sculpture that was installed on Hamilton’s waterfront on Sept. 30, 2023 – the National day for Truth and Reconciliation – which brought together the lndigenous and Hamilton community to honour residential school survivors, the children who never made it home and to celebrate reconciliation in action. She is ecstatic to have been able to co-create a much needed, public art legacy for the City which will also be a designated space for the urban lndigenous community to gather. Future plans are to create an education component and programming for youth.

Christina Popescu

PhD student in social psychology at UQÀM

Hamilton and Montreal

Passionate about environmental issues and social justice issues, her research interests include climate change and ecoanxiety, solastalgia and environmental grief, as well as resilience in situations of climate stress. She is also interested in the humanistic-existential approach in psychology, attempting to integrate it into her research and into her future clinical practice. She integrates in her research  therapeutic practices based on attentive presence, the arts, as well as sensorimotor approaches.

Andy Berg

Artist and educator

Kingston

Andy Berg is a Settler and mid-career artist whose practice acknowledges the life,  history, health and culture of the land. Berg cites the influence upon her work of  numerous enriching encounters, such as teaching arts and crafts at the former federal  Prison for Women, serving as a community member for the Ontario Provincial Board of  Parole, Eastern Region, returning to university while raising a young family to complete  her BFAH at Queen’s U in 2008, while concurrently working as a Community Lay Chaplain, officiating for diverse rites of passage, including some of the first legal same sex marriages in Kingston.  

These encounters assist her with working through the domains of artistic walking,  feminism, truth and reconciliation, bioregionalism and intuitive technologies. Berg is a  partner in Riel + Berg Art and Culture with Georgina Riel (Batchewana First Nations).  Their recent public art project, a polychromatic ceramic mual, Gdoo-Naggininaa (Our  Dish) was unveiled at the Queen’s University Department of Psychology foyer in 2022. Berg has worked with NGOs, Waterlution (2017), as a Kingston artist facilitating a  community based permanent public art piece, Aqua Viva; a celebratory steel and  ceramic wallwork about participant relationships to Lake Ontario, now housed in the  Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning. Berg was an exhibiting artist in the joint Agnes  Etherington Art Centre, Kingston and No. 9 Gardens, Rideau Lakes land based  exhibition entitled “With the Land”, 2023, curated by Sunny Kerr, Agnes Contemporary  Art Curator. Most recently she has been a part time professor at St. Lawrence College  Brockville Fine Arts, Experimental Media: 2D and 3D Design. Her current work and  feminist art research is focused on a soft sculpture and ceramic installation including  sculpted zines and tea sets.

Lindsay Brant

M.Ed., PhD (ABD), Cultural Studies, Queen’s University

Kingston

Lindsay Brant is an Associate Director, Indigenous Curriculum Development, working with the Weeneebayko-Queen’s Health Education Campus project team. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Smith School of Business at Queen’s, and co-developed and co-taught a course called Relationships and Reconciliation in Business and Beyond. Lindsay has been recognized with two awards in 2021, an Educational Leadership Award from the Educational Developer’s Caucus and an Idea’s Worth Teaching Award from the Aspen Institute, which recognized her course in the Commerce program at Smith. She also won two Principal’s Teaching & Learning awards in the category of Indigenous Education in 2022-2023 for her work on two separate interdisciplinary and cross-institutional research teams at Queen’s University’s Faculty of Health Sciences. Lindsay is also an accomplished storytelling, writer and poet.

Sunny Kerr

Curator, artist, and writer

Kingston

Sunny Kerr is a curator, artist, and writer. He is a settler of Scottish and Irish descent living and working in Katarokwi/Kingston, Ontario as Curator of Contemporary Art at Agnes Etherington Art Centre with adjunct teaching appointments at Queen’s University. Kerr thinks with the experiences, provocations and potentials of art and the uneasy legacies of culture amid the urgencies of racist violence and climate change. He continually tries to contextualize and put his work in reciprocal dialogue with ecologies and inventive artistic thinking-making. Kerr completed his doctorate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University and elaborates curatorial thinking with graduate students in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Queen’s Department of Film and Media.

Helena Vallée-Dallaire

Contemporary visual artist and educator.

Montreal

Helena Vallée-Dallaire is a contemporary visual artist and educator who loves creating spaces for discovery and connection between people of all ages and backgrounds, and believes in the power of storytelling to awaken deep attention and understanding towards all forms of life . She holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and works as a cultural mediator and drawing teacher at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She has created and facilitated various events and workshops engaging the public in environmental action and awareness through artistic practices. She has exhibited and taught internationally, and is a recipient of various prizes and honors, including three grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Her work can be found in public and private collections around the world.

Anne Deslauriers

Professor at the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM, specializing in the field of education.

Montreal

Her work focuses on articulation between arts education and environmental education, both in formal and non-formal settings, as well as in collaboration with artists. In adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it explores the interactions between these two fields, thus enriching the perspectives of contemporary education. Moreover, she is involved in promoting inclusion and personal development in the educational context. His expertise also includes arts teaching, both primary and secondary level.

Simon Goulet- Tinaoui

PhD candidate in psychology (research-intervention – UQÀM)

Montreal

 He explores the links between the current and future socio-ecological catastrophe and the psychological challenges of becoming a (grand)parent.

Passionate about the psyche and the environment, he graduated from the short 2nd cycle program on attentive presence in helping relationships, from the Research and Intervention Group on Attentive Presence (GRIPA – UQÀM).

He collaborated with the non-profit Éco-Motion, offering experiential workshops on eco-emotions in order to tame them and stimulate psychological adaptation to the ecological crisis.

Léa Ilardo

Territorial equity coordinator at Vivre en Ville

Montreal

Léa Ilardo is the territorial equity coordinator at Vivre en Ville, where she works to document and find solutions to reduce inequities across Montreal’s neighborhoods. She holds a master’s degree in applied political studies from the University of Sherbrooke, for which she focused on social health inequalities amplified by climate change. She has been campaigning and supporting citizen mobilization for environmental justice through her professional and personal implications for several years, and collaborates with different media in order to share knowledge and solutions to our major present and future challenges. Furthermore, Léa is interested in the place of culture in the socio-ecological transition. She is co-founder, with Léa Vandycke and Clémence Roy-Darisse,  of the non-profit Éclore, which aims to create bridges between artistic and environmental circles for a more just and sustainable world.

Valérie Ivy Hamelin

Multidisciplinary artist 

Montreal

Valérie Ivy Hamelin is a multidisciplinary artist who expresses herself with voice, transverse flute, hand drum, African percussion and gumboots. A member of the Micmac Nation of Gespeg, she likes to celebrate, honor and participate in the revitalization of her culture and language through song, music, stories and the connection to the territory.  In 2009, she studied classical music at Collège Lionel-Groulx, with a specialization in transverse flute. At the end of her studies, she won a scholarship following a competition organized by SODET of Ste-Thérèse, which allowed her to start her event production company and artist agency, Les Productions Mosaïculture. Her journey as a dancer, chorister and musician in the world of world music has given her the opportunity to rub shoulders with countless artists from different ethnic communities, and to discover diverse and rich musical traditions. She has been part of several musical groups and dance troupes. She performed from 2008 to 2018 with  the Mafrica formation, led by Sadio Sissokho, which was merged in 2019 to become Mi’gmafrica. She is part of the Artist at School program, in trio with Sadio Sissokho and Cheikh Anta Faye. She presents stories, traditional songs and Mi’gmaq culture in schools, libraries and festivals. It offers conferences and panels on culture  mi’gmaq, indigenous history and in connection with its environmental activist actions (Mishtetuteiat, Amnesty International, Global Forum Against Extractivism, Mining Watch Canada in South Africa). Dedicated to water protection, she has been sitting on the board of Coalition Eau Secours since 2020 and was elected vice-president in December 2022. She is currently studying governance and indigenous intervention at UQAT

Susan Turcot

Artist and professor at UQAM

Montreal

Since the 1990s, Susan Turcot has been interested in environmental and social issues using documentary drawing, audio and sculpture as part of a collaborative approach.

Anne Isabelle Leonard

Interdisciplinary artist and facilitator

Montreal

Anne Isabelle Leonard is a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist and facilitator known for her work at the intersection of visual arts, social art and environmental advocacy. Her interdisciplinary artistic practice encompasses performance, video, drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, as well as community engagement, curating and arts administration. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University (2015), as well as a number of parallel trainings that articulate her interdisciplinarity.

In addition to her artistic practice, Leonard has led the Montreal free dance community Danser Dans l’Noir since 2017 and is the co-founder of the Outdoor Artist Collective, an NPO highlighting the power of artists as important ambassadors of the socio-ecological transition.

Léa Vandycke

Planning and environment advisor

Montreal

A trained biologist, Léa holds a masters degree in environmental studies. She supports Quebec municipalities in climate change adaptation through Vivre en Ville as a planning and environment advisor. Concerned with finding new ways to engage citizens towards the preservation of all  life, she co-founded Éclore with the aim of strengthening the place of artists at the heart of necessary environmental transformations.

Alex Côté

International artist

Montreal

Born in Montreal / Tiöhtià:ke / Mooniyang, Alex Côté practices performance, photography, video, as well as site-specific and land art. Evolving in front and behind the camera, the LGBTQIA+ artist has participated in exhibitions, residencies, and festivals in France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Poland and Portugal, including several performances at Montreal, Venice, New York and Fort-de-France. With the support of the Arts Council and letters from Quebec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Alex Côté’s efforts lead to the creation of video installations, photographic series, performances and recordings, cinematographic films driven by an environmental intention. He presented numerous exhibitions in Montreal, notably at Livart, for Fierté Montréal, at the Parc des Faubourgs, at the Age of Union Center, as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. In recent years, the artist has pursued in-depth research, documenting performative experiments in relation with water and the environment. In 2021, he created remote correspondence with the artist Anishnaabe and Oji-Cree dancer Lara Kramer as part of Penpals du Center Choreographic O-Vertigo. In March 2022, Alex Côté inaugurated a permanent work and immense jellyfish made of plastic debris recovered from the waters and banks of the River Saint-Laurent, commissioned by Waterlution at the Aquarium du Québec SÉPAQ. He is founder of the creative organization L’Idylle Arts Vivants.

Marie Di Caro

Multidisciplinary artist and art therapist

Montreal

Enrolled in a master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM Marie Di Caro has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and has completed a 2nd cycle microprogram in art therapy, as well as a certificate and a bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts.

A multidisciplinary artist, she is interested in the omnipresent and often unconscious paradigms of speciesism and heteronormativity, and seeks to make tangible the realities and dynamics that result from them. She is currently developing a drawing/writing technique playing with the literal/figurative dichotomy, and which explores the boundaries and tensions between the poetic, literal, hermetic and explicit aspects of a text and/or an image. While questioning the role and readability of images and their discourse, Marie Di Caro aspires to anchor her practice in the field of social justice, and contribute to the questioning of habitus linked to speciesist and heteronormative structural dynamics.

Marie-Pierre Labrie

Guest professor at the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM

Montreal

Marie-Pierre Labrie is a guest professor at the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM. Her research focuses on the integration of mobile technologies and networks in educational and artistic interventions, in particular by relying on the pedagogy of corporeality (embodied pedagogy), virtual co-presence as well as multi sensoriality. (Montréal)

About Climate Anxiety

There is little argument that climate change is one of the most pressing challenges humanity has confronted. It permeates all aspects of life, the narratives across media, and the psyches of our elders and children. Evidence of the impact is growing. In a 2023 study of Canadian youth (aged 16-25), 56% reported feeling afraid, sad, anxious, and powerless; 78% indicated that climate change impacts their overall mental health and 37% reported that their feelings about climate change negatively impact daily functioning”. Yet strategies to mitigate/lessen the distress are lacking.

The Impact of Art

New research for climate change related art to provide a medium for engagement and healing is emerging. Roosen, Klockner & Swim (2017) have examined the psychological benefits that visual art offers to the climate change crisis, finding that: “perceiving and processing art requires parts of the brain that are not normally accessed by typical communications about climate change … It involves novel metaphors, analogies or narratives, which climate communication generally lacks … and provides visualizations of the problem, … gives personal experience with the subject-matter and may also help to establish a group identity that gives a sense of being supported in efforts to help combat climate change”. The arts community is also being called upon to help give “voice to [society’s] concerns and fears” and is increasingly recognized for the unique way in which artists serve as witnesses, bridge fact and turn emotion into action.

our partners

Cotton-Factory