Foraging-Scapes

Two years ago, I started little sewing projects that helped me reflect on our work of creating gardens using plants native to this region and area. Details of some of them are here. I started out just using the stuff I had at hand- inherited, bits of old clothes, cloth from the second hand store that I'd picked up over the years.


I wanted to tie the materials to the story of the cloth: telling a story about recovering a landscape by reusing stuff. (That's a pun I think...)


Those little cloths featured my representations of seeds, pollen, water, soil, rain, lightening, day and night, snow, leaves, all the stuff that 'makes' the garden.


And the bugs. All the bugs that show me that the new landscape we are creating here is integrated into a bigger web of life beyond the borders of our yard.


The bugs undid my conventional view of gardens as bounded. This place is part of a landscape of places, all bound up in a web of living things. An invisible network. A 'foraging-scape' maybe.


And so I'm starting another little project about these foraging-scapes, to help me think about them. In honour of the work my little bug friends are doing, of the journeys they are making to link our place up to the other places they go, I'm using 'foraged' stuff for the project.


This is the stuff I'm starting with, dyed with stuff we find on our walks. The cloth so far is some from my Mom's old silk blouses, found rags and bits from found quilts. I'll keep you posted.