Daily Dose — Oxygen Art Centre Hosted Unique Summer Artist Resident
By Ari Lord
The Oxygen Art Centre is Nelson recently hosted interdisciplinary artist Chris Dufour during their summer residency.
From July 1st to August 18th, Dufour brought their unique experience as an artist to the experience, and created art with a wide range of natural materials, include plant dyes.
The Halifax born artist taught four workshops during their residency, most remarkably, how to develop black and white film using plants found in our surroundings and also used this residency to process larger questions around ecology, power, and relationship to care. In some ways they use their art to envision a different future where humans co-exist more peacefully with the natural world.
“It’s been such a privilege to have the space to work and explore ideas around the project that I’ve been working on. I’m exploring relationships to industrial spaces, kind of ecologies that might have been discarded or left out, left a little bit destroyed,” says Dufour.
In particular, the artist explored the relationship to logging cut blocks. Dufour comes to this artistic work from a unique perspective, as someone who has worked in the forestry industry as a tree planter for nearly a decade.
“I’m exploring what it looks like to come into relationship with those spaces through material practices. Researching more about various forestry practice, and also thinking about natural ecology of what regeneration might look like in those sites, and drawing in those plants and materials into natural dye, into pigment making, quilting, into a textile practice,” Dufour explains.
Dufour processed the contradictions of their interest in ecology and making a living in forestry.
“It’s a world where I make a profit and also there’s a lot of practices in the industry that are problematic. The monocropping and the large extraction, although trying not to make broad-sweeping statements about forestry in general because there’s a lot of small communities whose economy relies on forestry,” says Dufour.
Dufour used this project to contemplate ecologies that have been changed at the hands of humans.
“Even in Nelson thinking about all of the damming systems. Those are ecologies that have been altered and forever changed. And we are being forever changed, too. There (is an) old knowledge that’s lost. There’s ecological processes that are deeply controlled.”
During their residency, Dufour did a series of workshops open to the community, four total, including exploring alternative photography processes.
Dufour, who moves around to do their art, grew up outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has spent the last eight years working. Dufour has been working very seriously as an artist for the last five years.
After attending the Yukon School of Visual Arts, which they say was “phenomenal,” Dufour started a practice of grassroots learning that brought them to social practice, permaculture, soil ecology, and accessible community-based education.
After college they ended up going to Victoria, where they did community-based education, composting and gardening and were even part of building a permaculture farm.
Dufour values projects which seek to utilize material practices as a facilitator, to process connections and relationships to ecologies, modalities of care, alternative futures, and ruminations about world building.
Dufour has been very experimental with materials during this residency. They have been using materials found at cut blocks like fireweed to develop black and white film, and has been doing a lot of natural dyeing and eco printing. They have processed a bunch of ochre (a natural clay earth pigment) from a cut block.
“I’m starting to utilize those materials into the practice to think through the relationships between textiles, care, and ecology,” says the artist.
They only recently learned to process film with fireweed.
“It’s fascinating. I’ve been doing research, working with an artist run centre in Montreal, and I’m learning a lot of this, but there’s so many plants that you can develop black and white film with,” says Dufour. “They end up developing as well as a synthetic one that you would buy at a chemical store.”
During their residency, Dufour did a series of workshops open to the community, four total, including exploring alternative photography processes.
“The workshops are meant to invite people into the research and also the material practices,” says Dufour.
While in Nelson, Dufour has been very focussed on their art, but did manage to get out for some adventures, like hiking Jumbo.
After their residency, the artist headed to Cape Breton but will certainly still be working with the questions that shaped their residency.
Ari Lord is the Hall Printing Daily Dose reporter for The Nelson Daily
Interdisciplinary artist Chris Dufour recently completed a residency at Oxygen Art Centre where they shared their skills with the community, including how to develop photographs using locally sourced plants like firewood.
