Image by C.B.

Re-lifing Environmental Restoration

The Initiative works to engage community members throughout what is currently known as the Lower Mainland of BC, delivering a series of workshops on Invasive Species-based art supplies and other useable materials in collaboration with non-for-profits and local volunteer groups. 

The traveling project was established in late 2021, aiming for ethical and reciprocal engagements within the often-destructive practices of invasive removal, offering use for the materiality of the plants that would otherwise go to waste.

Promoting dialogues on "environment", colonization and human exceptionalism, the project works with organizations in offering demonstrations, participatory workshops and talks on re-contextualizing  relationship with so-called Invasive Species. 

Paper Making   -   Pencils   -   Inks   -   Keychains   -   Monoprinting   -   Nature Journaling   -   Soap   -   More

Between creative & quantitive

Merging ecology & art, the Initiative provides a tactile approach to connections to urban nature, leading individuals and organizations with environmentally-conscious materials for communal creative output.

​"Everyone is an artist. Everyone is a steward"
​​- Joseph Boise
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Community building​

Having worked with numerous local and provincial organizations, the Invasive Art Initiative has facilitated programming for over 900 community participants. 

Fostering long-standing connections to environmental groups, workshop supplies are harvested from local and active restoration sites around the Lower Mainland.

Using a multidisciplinary and mixed media approach to placemaking, the workshops promote accessible spaces in considering the manifold relationships we share with other agents of the natural world.

Promoting dialogues

Between borders and belonging, what does it mean to interact reciprocally with Invasive plants?

To recognize these species as co-creators of a landscape? As beings with agency?
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Utilizing aspects of plant and people relationality, the Initiative works with the "unwanted", exploring the histories and lives of the plants as an act of reciprocity to the individuals who have not chosen to sprout in the soil with which they'd found themselves. Asking what is our role in engaging with the more-than-human beings we share our spaces with.

"Human-disturbed landscapes are ideal spaces for humanist and naturalist noticing. We need to know the histories humans have made in these places and the histories of nonhuman participants."

- Anna Tsing

Recent Supporters & Funders

Note: Invasive species pose numerous threats to native plants and animal populations. Often found in human-disturbed areas, these species occur outside of their natural range, have not co-evolved within the ecosystem they've been transported to, and are recognized to have negative ecological, cultural, or infrastructural impacts on their surroundings. They are often quick to establish in a given area, out competing native flora and fauna and reducing overall biodiversity by forming monocultures. Many invasive plant species provide themselves as poor habitat or food sources to native wildlife populations, posing a strong threat on both species at risk and specialist species. Through proper removal of invasive plants by stewardship groups and organizations, healthy ecosystems are offered a chance to thrive.