Wild Strawberries in Circle Mound

Performance and intervention
Guelph 2017

Acadian and Mi'kmaq artist Don Russell invited me to co-create an intervention into his sculpture Circle Mound at the Art Gallery of Guelph Sculpture Park. Circle Mound is a gathering site that acknowledges historic and ongoing Indigenous presence on this land and invites meaningful reconciliation between Indigenous and settler communities in Guelph.

For Wild Strawberries in Circle Mound, I harvested wild strawberry plants - a species with significant cultural and medicinal significance in many Indigenous cultures - from my sculpture ReMediate. We dug holes in the non-native turf in the sculpture and planted the strawberry plants with local Indigenous youth attending the University Aboriginal Resource Center's EAGLE program and art gallery staff.  Prolific multipliers, the wild strawberries will over time fill the green spaces of the sculpture and begin to proliferate into the sculpture park lawn.

The creation of this work was generously supported by the Art Gallery of Guelph.

Photos:  Terry Williams.