Response to Wasteland Labyrinth by Whitney Light

Breaking Ground
Whitney Light

A few vehicles speed by, but the people gathered on an empty plot at the corner of Higgins and Main Street barely notice. They're facing the early morning sun and listening to the song of the Sunrise Ceremony. Then, single file, each exits the circle, bending to pick up a small Sun Root tuber (helianthus tuberosus). To the beat of the ceremonial drum, they enter the labyrinth laid out in chalk marks on the ground. The drum stops, and all pause to plant their tuber in the hard earth. The work is almost done.

The artwork constructed this morning is called Wasteland Labyrinth. Designed by Kathryn MacKenzie, it was created in collaboration with Alison Cox, an aboriginal tradition advisor for Dufferin School, and Audrey Logan, a community gardener. MacKenzie’s previous projects have often involved challenging the visual codes and economic structures of the built environment and have also engaged people who have never been involved so directly in art before. This project did the same.

Through the process of building the labyrinth, members of different communities were brought together—artists, gardeners, inner city residents, academics, writers—to create a new community of activist-minded gardeners. Under-used as this plot of land in the inner city is, the garden-labyrinth is for both the earth and the people who live in the neighbourhood, and also for First Nations communities in Winnipeg whose right to land and livelihood often goes unacknowledged. Connections were made among people and between the people and the land—a meaningful point to those in attendance but also, evidently, to the local passersby who spontaneously joined our circle.

Wasteland Labyrinth might be called an environmental intervention. Like eco-feminist artists of the 1970s, MacKenzie is an artist who is making her practice part of environmental repair and sustainability, while raising issues of economic and racial inequality. First generation eco-feminist artists sought to “establish relationships based not on hierarchy and domination, but on caring, respect, and awareness of interconnection.” Fostering community connections and growing both food and flowers, Wasteland Labyrinth seems to speak to a similar view of art-making. The way it elevates awareness of interconnections is perhaps most powerful: on the morning of the ceremony, it changed people’s perception of the inner city. As a participant, I found myself attuned to the landscape in a way that everyday travel through the city never allows. It was as though the roads and buildings were ephemeral; we could be anywhere on the prairie, any time, present or past.

In The Reenchantment of Art, Suzi Gablik wrote that “ritual signifies that something more is going on than meets the eye—something sacred…The important thing is whether a shift in awareness occurs, creating a point of departure, an opening for numinous or magical experience that can never be obtained by cultivating intellectual skills.” Gablik contrasts this to modern consciousness, which is centred on rational and abstract thinking and leaves no room for perceiving other realities. The failures of this consciousness are visible in Winnipeg's inner city. In the minds of many citizens, Higgins and Main has become a synecdoche for its problems: poverty and homelessness, racism and violence, derelict buildings and under-used space. Perhaps the willingness to turn a blind eye is most damaging of all. It will take new and open thinking to move such fixed perceptions. And this is how the Sunrise Ceremony prepared the community of gardeners.

The ceremony will not be repeated, but others may experience such a change of consciousness through the labyrinth, for it also contains an element of ritual, or magic. Walking in a labyrinth is not like walking on the sidewalk, from one point to another. As Rebecca Solnit wrote, “The labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space.” The experience of Wasteland Labyrinth demonstrates this idea in two ways. First, we walk a symbolic journey through the inner city. When we step into the labyrinth and let following it be our focus, it becomes possible to see how the shift in perceptions taking place at this site raises issues that are related to similar processes of reclamation and restoration of land around the world. Small steps take on big meaning. When we reach the centre, we’ve arrived at a new real and metaphorical place of hope.

Second, there is the substance of the labyrinth, the Sun Roots themselves. In the act of planting we became real creatures engaged in the very human act of cultivating food. Each participant selected a tuber from a large collection cultivated by Logan from four original plants. The ground was hard, but Logan assured us that the Sun Root would grow. And they have. Several weeks after the planting, green shoots were emerging. As Logan pointed out, there is metaphor in this: life encounters hard times, but it carries on. Furthermore, the Sun Root has symbolic meaning in this setting. Though often referred to as Jerusalem Artichoke, the Sun Root was traditionally planted by First Nations in North America for food. The root is edible raw or cooked and suited to uses similar to the potato. Planting it here acknowledges both the claim Winnipeg’s First Nations communities have to this territory and the still vital role of traditional knowledge.

In these ways, the Wasteland Labyrinth creates meaning through metaphor and physical engagement. At the same time, it intervenes in the landscape in a practical way. Sun Root grows tall and produces a bright yellow bloom like a sunflower. In the summer, the labyrinth will be a living sculpture that beautifies the corner. In winter, the tubers will be ready for harvest, providing a source of food to a community that often lacks food security.

It is also a visible sign of resistance: MacKenzie proposes to erect a sign next to the labyrinth, facing the path across the plot that is walked daily by many local residents. Perhaps people will stop and enter. Perhaps not. Either way, the labyrinth’s presence is likely to inspire questions. Why is it here? To whom does this land belong? How is it being used? How can it change? The labyrinth marks resistance against the edifices that have created such pockets of “wasteland.” People have created this wasteland and only through people’s changed perspectives and efforts can it be restored.

At the Art Building Community symposium, participants raised the question of whether community art should “plant food or flowers” or simply offer reinterpretations of the world around us. I see Wasteland Labyrinth as incorporating each of these possibilities. That art has engaged a community in so elegant and vital an expression of caring and respect evokes great expectations for the kind of community that art can build.