As we welcome new people to the FEELed Lab, we want to make space for longer introductions to project team members and research affiliates joining us this year. This profile is on Liz Toohey-Wiese, who is joining the FEELed Lab as a visiting artist/scholar exploring the complicated topic of wildfires and their connections to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal.
1.Can you tell us about your work/research?
I’m an artist, primarily a landscape painter, and I’ve focused a lot on wildfires in my practice since 2018. The wildfire related artwork has taken a lot of different forms beyond painting– I’ve made postcards and billboards, sculptures and souvenir objects. I am also the co-creator and co-editor of a book called “Fire Season”. Along with my collaborator Amory Abbott, we curate submissions from contributors from all over the world who are reflecting on the topic of wildfires through both art and writing. “Fire Season” feels like a huge part of my art practice now, and the conversations around that book feel like some of the most exciting things I get to do with my art practice these days.
My research around wildfires has been all encompassing since I took up the topic. That research takes many forms– it might be looking to archives for historical images or wildfire propaganda posters, it might be ethnographic research in talking with community members in rural areas where wildfire evacuations are a yearly occurrence, it might be visiting a burn scar and noticing what is growing back. The research might result in a painting, a billboard installation, a poem, or the planning of an art workshop to offer to a community.
2.Why did you want to work with the FEELed Lab?
I am on a sabbatical from teaching from KPU, and with some freedom around not having teaching responsibilities for the next few months, I wanted to come back to the Okanagan. I did an artist residency in Vernon three summers in a row at the Caetani Cultural Center, and I’m really attached to this part of the world now. I wanted to connect with other academic institutions, and I knew about the FEELed Lab from attending their “Fire + Water Symposium” in 2022. I loved the interdisciplinary approaches to talking about the environment, it really aligns with the work I do with the Fire Season book, and how I approach my artistic research in general.
3.Why are expansive engagements with environmental issues important?
When speaking about environmental issues like the climate crisis, I think we have to approach these topics in so many different ways and make room for so many different voices to be at the same table. I hope to create work that bridges a gap I come across often in my practice, which is the urban/rural divide in BC. Most of my research happens in small rural communities in BC, and I spend a lot of time with folks with different backgrounds, different political views, and different takes on what should be done about wildfires in BC. With a problem as big as climate change, we can’t be divided on this issue. We need to learn how to build community across these differences, we need to get better at listening, and we need to learn how to work together with the person next to you, even if they are going to vote differently in the next election.
While at the FEELed Lab, I will be running art workshops on the topic of ecological grief. I fold in mindfulness practices, psychoanalytic approaches to group therapy, and theories of creative practice as a form of healing. We will be exploring wildfire ash as an art making material, and through guided prompts and exercises, we will be working on a collaborative art project together. In taking ecological grief workshops myself, I realized that the objects or artworks we made were secondary to the practice of just sitting at a table with other people feeling some of the same things as me, and just having our hands busy while we shared in conversation and community. I’d love for participants from inside the UBCO community as well as people from the greater Kelowna area to be able to take these workshops together, and to hopefully have some of these conversations around the places they care about together.
The FEELed lab 