Printing and Dissemination Updates

Over the past months the Fallen Leaves project has transitioned from fieldwork into the next stages of development. With the section of land it documents now, unfortunately, cleared, the focus shifts to refining how the imagery will be disseminated to meaningfully engage in ongoing discourse. The editing and sequencing of imagery is now underway, preparing for printing, as are the final adjustments to its online gallery and the virtual exhibitions gallery, which will be presented in applications for upcoming site-specific installations.

The sections of Ottawa’s suburbs which have been identified to be cleared in ongoing processes of urban sprawl. The imagery captured in Fallen Leaves represents a section of forest in Site 1.

Fallen Leaves leans heavily upon the philosophies of Bruno Latour, John Dewey, and fellow Canadian F.E. Sparshott, informing a methodological framework which situates us as active and duty-bound participants in a broader ecological network of relationships with our environment. In so doing, such trees and ecological communities are presented as embodiments of the interdependence between the environment and identity. The aim is to present the work as a cohesive narrative about the issues of Anthropocene relating to acts of urban expansion – both locally and in broader global discourses.

The next stage of the project will include producing a small series of printed photobooks and accompanying zines. These printed works are designed to extend the project's life beyond a single exhibition space, allowing viewers to engage with the imagery and accompanying research in a slower, more reflective way. The books will combine aerial photographs, ground-level studies of individual trees, and archival material that traces the sugar maple's symbolic importance in Canadian cultural history.

Images of prints being organized in efforts to determine the final layout of the printed books to accompany the installation applications.

Alongside these publications, plans are beginning to take shape for public dissemination through gallery spaces in the Ottawa region. Several venues are being explored for their ability to engage audiences already involved in conversations around environment, culture, and civic identity. Institutions such as the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Carleton University Art Gallery, and exhibition spaces connected to the National Capital Commission are particularly compelling because they attract visitors interested in regional history, landscape, and public discourse. Community-focused spaces like SAW Gallery or the Ottawa School of Art Gallery are also being considered for their strong ties to local artists and civic-minded audiences. The intention is that a future physical exhibition will bring these images back into the community whose landscapes they document, creating opportunities for dialogue about how cities grow, what is lost along the way, and how these questions might shape the future of Ottawa’s natural spaces.

Please follow along this journey and participate in any way you can!

Final Breaths

For the past seven months Fallen Leaves has documenting a seasonal cycle of a small forest section on the western outskirts of Ottawa, recorded from the ground as well as from the air during the final months before its clearing. While capturing the photos, I also captured audio and some video of the space, not with specific intent, but rather to recognize the experiential depth of the space beyond the frame of any photo.

F.E. Sparshott was one of Canada’s most prominent philosophers on the arts, his work was very influential in informing my methodology in this work. His position on the esoteric experiential understanding of natural landscapes was very effectively summed up by Allen Carlson’s statement, “nature is an environment and thus a setting within which we exist and which we normally experience with our complete range of senses as our unobtrusive background. But our experience being aesthetic requires unobtrusive background to be experienced as obtrusive foreground.” (Allen in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art)

After establishing the proximity and immediacy of our urban encroachment, the footage in the video begins quietly in summer and autumn. It showcases the canopy on the footsteps of Ottawa as it existed in the last full season before the clearing actions of Ottawa’s Schedule C17 began. As the sequences pass, the season moves into winter, and fallen leaves and snow cover the forest floor. Into January and February gaps appear where trees once stood, and the geometry of the landscape begins to change. Excavators, cross-sections of felled trees, and tread marks become the focus between the flakes of falling snow. Tree branches no longer dance, they lie still across a space that was once a complex ecosystem.

Despite the dramatic shift, the audio remains constant. An echo of the life which once occupied the region, much like the black and white is an echo of the formerly vivid fall canopies. These contrasts are intentional, preserving memory of life which will never return. In doing so, the video aims its lens at how urban sprawl affects ecological continuity. While this forest stood on the edge of Ottawa, the story it tells is hardly unique to us. By situating this local transformation within concerning global patterns, the project invites viewers to consider how the landscapes which shape our lives are quietly disappearing around us.

Virtual Exhibition

One aim of the Fallen Leaves project is to raise awareness in Ottawa. This project employs aerial photography, typologies, and archival reference, to reflect on the loss of these spaces. It intends to frame these lived spaces and clearing actions not only as ecological events, but as moments that reshape our shared identity and memory as a community and nation. As a component of that dissemination, I will be looking to showcase the work in galleries and art spaces. In my planning and outreach efforts I have developed a virtual exhibition as both a concept and example of what such an exhibition might look like.

These forests have long stood as a backdrop to daily life for thousands of residents, and their removal raises important questions about what is gained, and what is quietly lost, in the name of growth. In designing an online platform with integrated links to this site, social media platforms, and the associated zines which are in development, I intend to engage viewers from a variety of means.

Further, as urban expansion is a far broader global issue, employing broader and publicly accessible means of dissemination enable it to anchor the work in contemporary ecological dialogues. Please feel free to visit the space. 

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A sole tree standing in a cold Kanata field

“When the town fathers proposed lobbying for city status in 1852, William Stewart petitioned council to have is farm excluded from the new city limits. He argued that ‘the present limit of the Town is large enough for the next half-century.’

Stewart was not entirely right, however.

The land then within the limits would not contain the city’s expansion for five years let alone fifty.”

— -Bruce S. Elliott - The City Beyond: A History of Nepean, Birthplace of Canada’s Capital

Fallen Leaves Project

Our little family lives in Kanata, a suburb along the western edge of Ottawa, Canada’s capital.  Each morning I drive my kids to school along roads bordered by lush maple and mixed coniferous-deciduous forests.  For years, those woods felt beautifully seasonal, vibrant but at the same time fixed. They have been a silent and calming backdrop to our daily moments of connection in the few years I have before they find roads of their own.

The leaves of these sugar maple trees have become a defining symbol for Canadians.  Bright, iconic, enduring, they unite us. Their five-lobed leaves wave on our flag - not only stitched into the army uniform I wore most of my life, but stitched into our national identity.  Yet the living source of that symbol is being steadily erased.  The trees which gave rise to that symbol are increasingly fragile.  Large swathes of these spaces along our route, and across our capital, are being cleared in the name of urban expansion.  This project stares straight at that quiet erasure.  

James Ballantyne

While tracing the history of the maple leaf in Ottawa, I came upon The Village Maple.  Captured in 1892 by James Ballantyne, its tree grew long before I was born - in a place that I now call home.  It was a living witness to the birth of our nation, growing with us in the capital, a symbol of pride and strength.

That tree no longer exists - removed to make way for a seven-lane highway.

Village Without a Tree sits between those two points, a single tree lost in the past, and the measured sections being swept away presently.  These images, their sequencing, their dissemination and social engagement, all seek to ask what it means to belong to a nation that clears its emblem from its land.

Village Maple Tree

James Ballantyne

Where Ballantyne’s Tree Once Stood

Andrew Wesley

The project explores one of many sections identified under Ottawa’s urban expansion plan C-17. These sections, developed natural spaces with lived histories, will be wiped clear to make space for new townhouses, singles, and infrastructure. To see more of this project, please feel free to visit the virtual exhibition found HERE.

Fallen Leaves Virtual Exhibit