Layers of Landscape

A Site Specific Installation With Jill Didur, Grey Nun's Garden, Montreal, 2016

Some gardens hold more than soil, more than what grows above ground. Working with Jill Didur, I wanted to dig into exactly that layered quality, building a performative, site-specific installation for the Grey Nuns' Garden, a space opened to the public for the first time that evening, as part of a larger curatorial vision Cynthia Imogen Hammond and Shauna Janssen had shaped specifically to reframe this garden as contested, gendered ground, worthy of sustained attention rather than passing admiration.

Our piece took shape as twenty-five lanterns, scattered through the garden's paths, each one holding its own small archive — photographs, documents, images of Indigenous precolonial plant life, all nestled together inside glowing vessels. Walking lantern to lantern, visitors moved through layers of time rather than simple distance, each pool of light offering a different fragment of the garden's long, complicated memory.

This garden carries history in multiple registers, each worth sitting with. Generations of women labored here, tending this ground, building forms of knowledge rarely recorded in official archives, more often passed hand to hand, season to season. Beneath this labor, another layer insists on recognition: the land itself remains unceded Indigenous territory, its story inseparable from the area's colonial past, a past still unfolding into the present. Our lanterns tried holding both truths at once, refusing to let one erase the other, letting feminist history and colonial history sit together in the same small circles of light.

This installation was presented as part of "'Un paradis sans pommiers': Le jardin des Soeurs Grises," an evening garden event organized and curated by Cynthia Imogen Hammond and Shauna Janssen, held in conjunction with the Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference. Eleven other site-responsive artworks and performances joined ours that evening, each addressing the garden as a gendered space and contested heritage site.