Like all my pieces in this series, Angell Woods versions a publicly available map of an urban forested area in which I walk with my dog, Baloo. Underway since the spring of 2012, this series will include at least five maps, four of which are now underway or complete. Other maps in the series include Bois Summit Woods, Arboretum Morgan Arboretum, Canal de Lachine Canal and The Glendon Forest. This is artwork that has a political ecology agenda, exploring how and for whom – human and more-than-human – these urban woods come into being and sustain, especially amid great pressures of development.
Located in Montreal's suburban west island community of Beaconsfield, Angell Woods is an interesting patchwork of areas of land with multiple owners: two municipalities, one province, two conservation groups (through Ducks Unlimited and the Association for the Protection of Angell Woods (APAW) and several private owners. Although not technically a park, these precious 100 acres of green space are beloved and used by hikers and dog walkers from across the city and are an important natural oasis in an increasingly built up city. Angell Woods has been declared an exceptional forest ecosystem (EFE) by Quebec's Ministry of Natural Resources, and includes features such as extraordinary mature trees (some of which are centuries old), wetlands and some open grassy lands as well.
Angell Woods's status has been precarious for decades, with the constant threat of development. Largely thanks to the unwavering and thick-skinned manoeuvres of smart, savvy local conservationists and their allies, the Woods have endured this long. The fight recently heated up, with the City of Beaconsfield proposing to change zoning in order to permit condominium development in the Woods – or (the pro-amendment rhetoric goes) protect some of the ecosystem from the prospect of development by allowing high density building on a small portion of terrain that is described as not so ecologically valuable. Many citizens, local and otherwise (me among the latter), oppose any development in this precarious and very special eco-system. Many of us also condemn the way the Beaconsfield City Council tried to push through changes in zoning regulations with scant or no public consultation, just weeks in advance of Montreal's November 3rd municipal elections. And in fact, APAW is suing the City of Beaconsfield in Quebec Superior Court over the City's allowing condominium development along one stretch of Angell Woods, despite the full zoning changes not having been voted through.
Especially with my map of Angell Woods currently underway, I felt it important to attend the one Council meeting I could on the evening of September 24. Billed as a public consultation, the meeting was 90 minutes in before the Council ceded the floor to the voices of the concerned citizens who had come to speak; the Council used the first hour and a half to work point by point through proposed changes to the new zoning by-law. While the zoning changes were to have been voted on October 1, it seems as though – aside from permitting development on one parcel of land as mentioned above – the issue has been postponed until after the election. Although I am not new to the bitterness and bad behaviour of city politics (having worked early in the 2000s as part of a community group to help ensure the redevelopment of Toronto's Wychwood Streetcar Barns into a park and arts space), I was shocked by the lack of civility, mistrust and entrenched positions on all sides. Hexagram's embroidery studio, with its 10th floor view over the river and towards the Adirondacks, is of course a much more peaceful place to be – although I do believe it urgent and important for artists/citizens to be involved locally.
The swath of cloth above that looks golden is in fact ivory, a glorious piece of wool/cashmere I acquired for my Angell Woods project in May. Since then, I have been working steadily in the Hexagram embroidery studio to version onto this length of fabric (about 50 inches by 70 inches of image space within a larger border) the two maps that appear at the entrance to Angell Woods. As with all my recent maps of walks in urban woods, I use monochrome (ivory on ivory, in this case) digital stitchery to replicate the authoritative or public version of a map, with handwork representing my lived experiences there, each walk indicated in its own line of hand stitching.
When I first imagined working with the Brother PR-600 digital embroidery machine (here's a more up-to-date version of the Hexagram machine I use), I imagined a quick and painless activity almost like scanning. I would feed in the image and presto! out would come the stitched version. I woke up to reality with a thud when I realized that every stitch has to be programmed – and that I would need to learn the Embird software to do so. That was the summer of 2012, when I started this project with the Summit Woods and Arboretum maps. Since that time, I have come to understand a few small corners of the Embird system, just those that allow me to do what I wish.
Via Embird, I program the Brother digital embroidery machine to stitch versions of the texts, schematic maps, icons and photos that appear on the two posted Angell Woods maps. To create my versions, I piece together overlapping embroidery frames, my maximum increment just 20 by 30 centimetres. Day by day, week by week, I prepare and stitch my hoops and delight in the glossy effect of the ivory stitches against the puffy softness of the same-coloured cloth.
Most ambitiously, I aim to create a version of one map's photo of an aerial photograph of Beaconsfield, centred around the dense mass of this suburban forest. The photo of the computer screen below shows, in blue, work in progress via Embird to position the stitches that will create a version of the image. Beneath, a second image shows this particular hoop in the process of being stitched.
A hoop such as this takes almost two hours to stitch, four hours when you consider that I did a test hoop on a sample piece of cloth before having the confidence to reproduce the stitching on my precious 50 X 70 foot length. With forty-some frames, Angell Woods has developed into a work of 446,573 digital stitches (the count is necessary to the billing structure and the work's cost to me), representing hours and hours of work.
During the final stages of this digital embroidery, my thoughts go often not just to Beaconsfield and the vulnerabilities of the woods there, but also to my friend and mentor, Rishma Dunlop, who once upon a time grew up in this upper middle class community and writes of it in her poem Slow Dancing: Beaconsfield 1973, excerpted here:
For years we have danced in ballet studios, spinning, dreaming our mothers'
dreams of Sugar Plum Fairies, our rose tight confections, pink slippers twirling
pas de deux, jetés, pirouetting our taut muscles until our toes bled. But tonight
we dance in our tight blue Levis, our mothers' voices fading as Eric Clapton's
electric guitar shivers our spines, the music claiming us and we spill out
under the streetlamps, dancing across equators into the earth's light.
On the streets of suburbia, this is the beginning of hunger.
It catches me by surprise, exploding like a kiss.
-- Included in the collection, Reading Like a Girl (2004)
Thinking of Rishma, and the great support she has always shown for my own work first as my doctoral supervisor at York University and since – for my own hunger in art and life – I stitch a final hoop into my map of Angell Woods, for Rishma....
I will continue to think of Rishma as I begin the handwork on this map, stitching in the individual walks I take on this terrain as well as piecing in fabric that represents the variously owned parcels of land. It will all be the same 'white work' – or rather tones of white and ivory in lacy overlay. This single colour choice will keep the focus on the delicate subtlety of the piece's various textures and also play on the name of the site. 'Angell' reflects the family who once farmed the land rather than the pure – white? – celestial being, but of course these are connected. As is the fact that I am happiest walking these woods in the winter's bright snows, when the ground is frozen hard and the biting bugs of summer a distant memory.
Nel mezzo del camin: Bois Angell Woods will be complete, I hope, by spring, when the winter's whites yield to spring's more varied and energetic hues. And meanwhile, I use my weekly digital embroidery time in preparing the stitching for the next map, representing the de-industrialized green space of the Lachine Canal, stitch by stitch reflecting the world that I walk, step by step.
