
Botanical Reclamation
The Botanical Reclamation project celebrates the resilience of wild plants through naturally dyed textiles. From June to September 2021, I will investigate “Curious Spaces” in Guelph and gently harvest the plants that have reclaimed these sites to create a body of textile artworks using colour from the plants. A “Sad Space” (or "Curious Space) is a natural space that has experienced severe human-inflicted environmental disruption, but has begun a return to a natural state through the re-introduction of indigenous and invasive plant species. They are spaces of transition, of transiency, of loss, and of regeneration. They can be abandoned/decommissioned parking lots, quarries, dumps, industrial sites, as well as roadsides and median strips. If left alone for enough time, wild plants can reclaim these sites and kindle new hope.
The summer of 2021 holds a lot of hope as our community will begin to navigate our way out of a year-long pandemic. I believe that learning about the resilience of plants will provide inspiration and encouragement for us all to begin to rebuild our connections in meaningful ways. Through the process of harnessing colour from these plants and applying them to textiles, the community will gain a visual and tactile connection with the power of these local plants. Textiles and human bodies are intrinsically connected, and the forms they take in our garments, sheets, furniture, and comfort objects act as a second skin in our daily lives. This tactile and phenomenological relationship makes textiles the perfect medium for this message of resiliency.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anita Cazzola’s work inhabits the intersections between textiles, geology, geography, and the built human environment. Exploring the material and metaphorical complexities of cloth and geological forms, Anita reconsiders the destructive assumptions of decay and disintegration as means of resistance, reclamation and healing. She asks, how are our contemporary methods of delineating and constructing space (digital maps, rigid architecture, boundaries, and borders) mediating our connections to land and environment? These gridded structures are broken down, bent, curved, softened, and remade out of malleable materials to undo and reframe their resilience.
Anita Cazzola is a textile and installation artist from Guelph, ON. She completed her BFA at OCAD University in 2018, where she studied Sculpture and Installation and minored in Material Arts and Design with a focus in Textiles.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS
I am thrilled to be collaborating with local artist Jenna Kessler for these botanical illustrations. Through the dye process, I have been making Lake Pigments from exhaust dyebaths. I have tried these and given them to Jenna to use for her illustrations. It is stunning to see another way that plants are gaining another voice through the colour that they share with the world.
For the last decade, Jenna Kessler has been working as a farmer and illustrator, cultivating a relationship with the land and memorializing plants and landscapes in her paintings. She selects plant specimens to illustrate into botanical patterns, and loves depicting nature in all its forms and in every season.
In between growing food and plants and illustrating, she also carefully crafts songs that reflect her unique, artistic vision of the world and careful attention to detail. Her poetic new EP, A Still Life, is the culmination of these reflections in musical form. I invite you to have a listen to this wonderful work.
I look forward to sharing more of these illustrations with you as the project continues. Look for them throughout this website, as well as on our plant walks with Planting Radiance.
Dye Plant Of The Week
Throughout the summer of 2021, I focused on one plant per week, and shared information about the wonders that they share with us- as dyes, medicines, pollinator supporters, etc. View the Dye Plant of the Week archive here.

Help keep this project going
I am grateful to have received funding & support from the City of Guelph & Guelph Arts Council for this project. Some of you have offered to donate to the project to keep it going beyond this residency, so here is where that can be done. Feel free to make a note of an intention for what your donation will support (education, research, etc).
Enter the amount you wish to donate