This monograph chronicles the innovative human-nature co-creation project spanning three years realized by Angela Marsh and varied collaborators. Visual art, poetry, botany, science and new multi-species relationships all came together on the same territory, leaving traces of their benefits on the landscape and its visitors. The starting point for the original installation was the deliberate decision not to let a section of lawn on the plains of Abraham grow, so that the wild flora and the biodiversity it brings could revive the grass-dominated, manicured park. Marsh developed the project to incorporate artistic and ecological interventions as care practices. Each year, a different poet was invited into the collaboration (Marilyne Busque-Dubois in 2021, Andrée Levesque Sioui in 2022 and Isabelle Duval in 2023), with the artist integrating their words into the wild garden, alongside up-cycled wrought iron structures and the seeding of wild and native species of plants. The public was able to explore this place of multiple cohabitations with a different eye. The monograph gives an account of the scope of the research through a selection of images, texts and scientific data, articulating the different aspects of this new socio-environmental paradigm.
It's really just a love story
Angela Marsh
Originally from Montreal and Toronto, Angela Marsh lives and works in Quebec City, on the unceded territory of the Nionwentsio of the Huron-Wendat nation. She creates artistic-ecological-relational projects that search for intimate reciprocity and learning from nature. It’s really just a love story, her art-rewilding project presented by the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec in 2021, 2022 and 2023, earned her the title of finalist for the Prix Videre Création en arts visuels and runner-up for the David Suzuki Foundation Rewilding Art Prize. Angela holds a master’s degree in visual arts from Université Laval (2019) and a master’s degree in education (2004) from the University of Toronto. Since 2018, she has been weaving ruderal-plant tapestries across Quebec and Ontario and imagining art-rewilding installations where she collaborates with weeds that grow in vacant lots and monoculture lawns.