Uploaded October 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Hooker Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
Collective Remembering Mike MacDonald’s Medicine and Butterfly Gardens with Lisa Myers
If we think of land (including waterways) as readable, fluid and ever-changing, living and legible, then changes that move at a high pace and across large areas interrupts legibility.
This paper examines the video installations and Butterfly Garden artwork bythe late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald to think about scale and legibility of land and how his video making informed his garden/artworks planted across the land now known as Canada.
As an artist/curator, my work on MacDonald involves researching former sites of his gardens and collaborative replanting of these spaces with Indigenous artists, collectives and community. I discuss how his gardens are not just a land remediation project; they are spaces of contemplation that re-inscribe symbolic and material tensions and pressures that collide between Indigenous knowledge systems and extractive industries. In considering land as legible, I theorize how MacDonald’s work points to ecological degradation as a kind of redaction yet may function as a reminder of language and plant knowledge.
calendar.mcmaster.ca/events/hooker-distinguished-visiting-scholar-lecture-collective-remembering-mike-macdonalds-medicine-and-butterfly-gardens-with-lisa-myers
Hooker Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
Collective Remembering Mike MacDonald’s Medicine and Butterfly Gardens with Lisa Myers
If we think of land (including waterways) as readable, fluid and ever-changing, living and legible, then changes that move at a high pace and across large areas interrupts legibility.
This paper examines the video installations and Butterfly Garden artwork bythe late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald to think about scale and legibility of land and how his video making informed his garden/artworks planted across the land now known as Canada.
As an artist/curator, my work on MacDonald involves researching former sites of his gardens and collaborative replanting of these spaces with Indigenous artists, collectives and community. I discuss how his gardens are not just a land remediation project; they are spaces of contemplation that re-inscribe symbolic and material tensions and pressures that collide between Indigenous knowledge systems and extractive industries. In considering land as legible, I theorize how MacDonald’s work points to ecological degradation as a kind of redaction yet may function as a reminder of language and plant knowledge.
calendar.mcmaster.ca/events/hooker-distinguished-visiting-scholar-lecture-collective-remembering-mike-macdonalds-medicine-and-butterfly-gardens-with-lisa-myers
