English ivy woven into spiderwebs, native plant seed bombs, interpretive dance performances, storytelling and a salmon cookout are just some of the art and activities people can expect to see at the Pulling To Gather Earth Day celebration at Colliery Dam on Saturday, April 27.
Organized by the Art Action Earwig Collective in partnership with the Nanaimo Forest School, the event is the culmination of a series of ivy-pulling work parties the collective have organized over the past month in an effort to clear the Colliery Dam of invasive species and infuse the space with creativity and art.
“We’re tearing out ivy below the waterfall at Colliery Dam and replanting nettle, bleeding hearts, crab apple and elderberry, and then the kids are watering them. That’s the whole kind of Forest School experience that they’re having, about caring for the land,” says Nanaimo Forest School owner Michael Geselbracht.
“It’s a lot of child-led, curiosity-led play and adventure. We build stuff, we learn about plant medicine. It’s just a lot of playing together and allowing the forest to be the infrastructure. The beautiful, magical, ever-changing space that the kids feel way more alive in.”
One of the installations will be a further iteration of Art Action Earwig’s Give Birth Love Tooth exhibit that was displayed at the Nanaimo Art Gallery last year.
“There was an installation of this big tooth, love tooth, where people could clip their own tooth story on pieces of paper and we noted that some of them may be composted or made into seed bombs afterwards, so we’re doing that with those stories for this new installation,” says Art Action Earwig co-founder Minah Lee.
“We’re making a papier maché from those story pieces and they are mixed into tooth-shaped native seed bombs that will be installed and that people can harvest.”
The collective — which also includes members and artists Wryly Andherson and Tadafumi Tamura — got its name from their first project called home squat home, which they were working on when the pandemic lockdown hit, says Lee.
“It was inspired by when my mother, who was living in Korea, came over here and we traveled to one of the Gulf Islands. We were doing this lovely picnic moment with my family when my mom, who is very scared of insects, discovered she was very scared of the earwig. So we just kind of made a little story about it,” says Lee.
“I was thinking about the Western myth about the earwig — that when an earwig crawls into your ear it can drive you mad. In the Western myth there is a connection between madness and earwigs. So to us, it seems like there’s something about art speaking to the truth or finding an unlikely or creative way to get to the truth that almost seems a bit maddening.”
The Pulling To Gather event is free and for all ages, and runs from 1 to 9 p.m. at Colliery Dam Park on Saturday, April 27. There is also one more ivy-pulling work party at Colliery Dam before the event on Sunday, April 21 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
