The House of Dust by Alison Knowles
INHABITED BY BIRDS AND FISH
*Nicole Fournier, Landscapes+ EmballeToi!, 2012-3012 (1000 years)*
Landscapes - bioremediation and fertilisation
cleaning processes by soil, microorganisms
and plants as symbiotic systems.
Petrolium based synthetic textiles from used
winter coats destined to landfills, soil (clay,
sand, humus, compost), microorganismes,
insects, a biodiversity of plants (goldenrod,
aster, agastache, mint, artemesia, motherwort,
yarrow, ground elder, jerusalem
artichoke, morning glory, etc).
With assistance from Michelle Lacombe.
The Montreal-based artist Nicole Fournier’s work extends outwards from an awareness of interconnected life-forms. Her long-term work of rewilding her land, situated in the midst of a typical suburban neighbourhood, has generated various ecosystems from which she witnesses the performances of plants, microbes, and other life-forms that have taken root there. The EmballeToi! project began from the premise of re-using discarded synthetic winter coats destined for landfill. Fournier introduces the coats onto the land, and allows the soil, insects, and plants to embed themselves on and within these unnatural forms of human insulation. This has led her to hypotheses about the possibility for this system of soil, plants and microorganisms to perform a process of bioremediation of the microplastics from these synthetic materials, which are polluting life in the oceans on a cellular level. The first adaptations of EmballeToi! have been evolving now for five years on Fournier’s suburban land, where the discarded winter coats have been buried, grown over, and artistically and manually transformed into containers that act as mobile homes for fragmented ecosystems of a biodiversity of plants, soil, microbes and insects. Fournier presented a performance and a long-term installation that continued these processes of urban rewilding, bioremediation and fertilising the land proximate to the Fonderie Darling and The House of Dust exhibition