SAINT CLARE’S GARDEN
An effort to implicate the memories and experiences of people living in Toronto into the landscape. A calendar describing the weather for 1000 days.
begun 2018, completed 2021
six tiles describing increasingly rainy days. White represents negative space in this graphic.
In 2018, I was contracted as an artistic consultant to work on a new affordable housing development by St. Clare’s Multifaith Housing Society. The new building will house 22 people currently facing homelessness and housing insecurity. Along with general consulting duties, myself and Toronto artist Margaux Smith were tasked with developing elements of the building’s exterior and landscape. An early concept of Smith’s was to use the designs we developed to describe data relevant to the building’s location and purpose.
a window grille acting as a key to the precipitation & humidity data described in other areas of the property. The top middle tile represents a desert-dry day. The bottom corners could represent blizzards or rainstorms once informed by temperature data. The final version will be cut from 1/16” steel sheet with a water router.
The alternate design leaves most of the window open.
Saint Clare’s Garden is my application of that design philosophy. It consists of unique ‘tiles’ algorithmically generated from drawings I have made of indigenous and indigenized plants such as cedar and chamomile. The drawn elements are combined as silhouettes in varying densities, incorporating various plant shapes, and in varying degrees of asymetry to describe input parameters such as temperature, humidity and precipitation, and various from seasonal norms. The primary application of this motif is as silhouettes cut from metal sheet to be used as railings, fences, and other spatial dividers.
an alternate version of the above tiles favouring privacy. Here, black represents negative space.
The resulting tiles can be configured as calendars or other data structures to describe the natural elements of Toronto in a form that recognizes the experience of living exposed to them, and geographically locates the building in is geographical position. The initial designs were strictly derived from plant forms. In later versions of the design, I have taken further design cues from jaalis (indo-islamic architectural screens) and the linework of Norval Morriseau. ,This motif culminates in a massive calendar cut from sheet steel describing the outdoor conditions in Toronto during the construction of the building, functioning as a fence across the front of the property.
an early proof-of-concept. Here, the same 25 tiles are used to describe a variety of patterns and tessellation algorithms. Can you tell one pattern from the next?