(Re)Seed

Photo gallery - (Re)Seed blog

(Re)Seed.  A participatory installation at The New Art Festival, Ottawa

by Susie Osler

 

Artist's Statement

Nature is full of ephemeral beauty and transient gifts - clouds shaping and reshaping, the morning and evening light, bird song in spring, the fleeting bloom of flowers…  Everything moves and morphs.  A meadow of wild flowers changes year to year. Beauty settles in temporarily, then offers itself elsewhere.  Flowers disappear only to pop up in another unexpected place to delight and surprise.

2000 ceramic flowers were 'planted' on in Central Park, Ottawa during The New Art Festival (June 4/5).  Visitors to the festival were invited to take a flower and to help ‘re-seed’ the meadow by planting the chosen flower somewhere else - in a spot, or to a person they felt needed an offering of beauty, joy, hope, nature, peace.

Artist's Bio

Susie Osler is a ceramic artist living in Eastern Ontario. The gift, or offering, public participation, nature, and delight are central concepts in much of her work.  Her interest in public art – particularly for rural spaces led to the development of fieldwork in 2008 - a public art space dedicated to site-specific work, which is located in one of the fields on her farm. She, together with 3 others (Chris Grosset, Chris Osler, and Erin Robertson) make up the fieldwork Collective. 

Photos

Here are a couple of pictures of the installation in situ, and visitors young, and old(er) reflecting on the flower field, and choosing a flower to 're-seed'.  More to come, including photos from participants who picked flowers from the meadow to re-seed elsewhere.