As part of Holly Schmidt’s three-year residency at UBC, the artist presents Forecast (2019-23), the latest in a series of short poetic texts using the language of weather reporting to speculate on collective responses to environmental changes. Printed on vinyl with a mirror finish, Forecast reflects the surrounding environment and explores the effects of weather patterns and seasonal shifts on the local campus ecology, including its plant, animal, fungal and human participants. Originally installed on the windows of the AHVA Gallery at UBC and presented as part of the exhibition …we can know more than we can tell… curated by Christine D’Onofrio, changing Forecast texts have appeared on the Belkin’s clerestory windows as well as on those of the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS).
Following another year of challenging weather, Schmidt offers a final iteration of the Forecast series before the culmination of her residency. These Spring/Summer texts consider how human and non-human species adapt to, or struggle with, unpredictable weather patterns. While the previous Fall 2022 installations saw Schmidt collaborate with Sheryda Warrener’s graduate students in Creative Writing (Jasmine Ruff, Dora Prieto, Alejandra Morales, Hannah Möller, Eleanor Panno, Edie Chunn, and Sofia Osborne), for this version Schmidt concludes four years of imaginative, slow and careful reportage with her own, sole, compositions. Forecast will culminate in a publication this summer with a book launch set to coincide with the closing of the exhibition What is Welcome? (23 June-13 August 2023).
Read the full Forecast texts from Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, and Spring 2023.
Vegetal Encounters is Holly Schmidt’s multi-year residency with the Outdoor Art Program at UBC. Through this residency, Schmidt creatively engages with plant life as a significant source of life, connection and learning. The artist suggests that learning with plant life involves slowing down and using all of the senses to engage deeply and with respect. As part of her residency, Schmidt creates opportunities for students, staff and faculty on campus to attend to the plants around them. This engagement will result in a range of art projects in various media and of different durations.
Photos (from above): Rachel Topham photography, Owen sopotiuk and tim herron
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During Holly Schmidt’s three-year residency with the Belkin, she created Forecast (2019–23), a series of short poetic texts using weather report language to reflect on environmental changes. [more information and purchase] -
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Vegetal Encounters is Holly Schmidt’s three-year residency with the Outdoor Art Program at UBC. Through this residency, Schmidt has been creatively engaging with plant life as a significant source of life, connection and learning.
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Fireweed Fields transforms a UBC lawn site into a fireweed meadow, encouraging increased biodiversity through gradual succession as a metaphor for the resurgence of life after a crisis. This installation acknowledges the global climate emergency: by tearing through the fabric of maintained lawns and colonial ideals, it plants the initial seeds for change and catalyzes dialogue, creative experimentation, and new biodiversity research and learning opportunities.
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At the Belkin, we often receive questions about the University’s Outdoor Art Collection and what is involved with commissioning, acquiring or accepting donations. Responding to this growing interest, we issue annual outdoor art newsletters to share updates and backstory information about what is involved with curating, stewarding and activating the collection. These newsletters also offer a forum for the Belkin’s curatorial team to share their research and insights about art in public space.
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In collaboration with the UBC Film Society and screening at The Norm, the Belkin presents a short program of films selected by Holly Schmidt that resonate with Vegetal Encounters, her slow residency in the gallery's Outdoor Art Program. The selected films, Wild Relatives, Fordlandia and Indigenous Plant Diva, engage in multiform ways with questions of presentness, biodiversity and learning from the relationships between human and non-human beings.
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On Sunday, June 20, the summer solstice, we will project Jumana Manna’s film Wild Relatives (64 minutes, 2018) on the Belkin's Outdoor Screen located on the exterior of the gallery's wall along Main Mall, in a conversation across media with Holly Schmidt’s Fireweed Fields. The strange, spasmodic course of space and time in recent months has been mitigated by little other than the changes in seasons, the rhythms of nature, and the communal spaces offered by the outdoors. Seasonal and celestial markers such as that of the solstice bring this collective orientation upward and outward into marked relief. Wild Relatives will screen first at 11 am and then on each odd hour with the last screening at 7 pm.
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As part of Holly Schmidt's Vegetal Encounters residency, the artist has collaborated with Lecturer Bill Pechet and students from UBC’s Environmental Design (ENDS) program, in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture to explore the potential for a mobile structure to support residency programming on campus.
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Download and print the sensorial workshop Holly Schmidt devised for UBC mycology students and enjoy nature a little differently.[more] -
The Belkin’s Lorna Brown talks with artist in residence Holly Schmidt about her practice and its relationship to care, distance and embodiment in this very particular historical moment.
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Students from UBC’s Department of Biology practice botanical drawing – and immersive observation – with artist in residence Holly Schmidt.
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In this edition of the Outdoor Art newsletter, we consider the ways in which artists’ practices are grappling with the politics of public space from both a local and global perspective. Through connections between two public art projects currently underway on the UBC campus with those being featured in the Belkin’s upcoming exhibition The Willful Plot, we can trace how the artworks forefront life cycles and the range of conditions that sustain or disrupt them. These artists explore in the broadest sense their relationship to the land.
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