Songs From the Forest – Opus I is an immersive installation that firmly situates Simpson’s perspective that was shaped by a youth spent in the Acadian forests, a professional life in forestry, and an ongoing artistic practice that remains rooted in those same forests. Day lily, iris, dandelion, rush, cattail, and other foraged native plants are processed into fibres and given new life as strange forms of nature. This work is grounded in both lived, practical knowledge and an educational perspective, tying together a studied practice of basket weaving that is at once creative and practical. Woodland Opus reflects the instinctual meeting of the natural world with human need, turning it into a woven composition of locally foraged fibres, sensory experiences (touch, smell, memory), and the complexity of environmental resiliency and adaptation.

Simpson has studied basket-making practices both worldwide and locally, demonstrating a deep understanding of their simultaneous and widespread origins, integral role in daily life, and their connection to culture and identity. This exhibition can be read as a reference of nature, labour, and creativity as well as an encounter with a process that is entangled with history, culture, and shared knowledge. A meditative ritual that creates a fantastical landscape for ecological storytelling and material understanding.

Laura Roy balances humour with the severity of health issues, using textiles and craft techniques to discuss issues like difficult to navigate hospital systems and conceptual explorations such as the blending of time spent sick, spent in limbo in waiting rooms, and moments of reprieve. Roy creates colourful, embroidered tapestries and textile installations that are informed by her own experiences with illness and her medical journey. The work is chaotic and considered, aggressive and soft, evoking a feeling of “too-muchness” and harmony that is at once disorienting, overwhelming, playful, and tactile.

Erin Goodine employs a more subtle theatricality in their paintings. Influenced by film and rooted in their drawing practices, their work blends reality and imagination, presence and absence, inside and outside. Goodine employs a variety of transparent layers and subtle textural shifts but exposes the underpainting. They depicts recognizable, physical spaces but renders them with an even colour and geometric qualities; effectively conflating two sides of the art historical shift between highly realistic paintings meant to deceive the eye (tromp l’eoil) and abstracted works that do not try to escape the inherent flatness of a canvas. The material application of Goodine’s paintings is designed to bridge the core of their practice (drawing) with painting, explore cinematic tropes, and, in doing so, pushes the physical elements of a painting to project their attempt to capture transformation, change, movement, and memory.

The work of both artists rejects the belief that physical spaces are fixed and unmoving. They make visible the fundamental porousness of places and environments that both influence and are influenced by our own bodies, our own experiences, our own memories. Using medical tools and toys commonly found in waiting rooms, Roy positions these objects as concurrent sites for trauma, nostalgia, relief, and joy while Goodine moves in and out of fixed definitions to make the familiar unfamiliar. Both demonstrate a resistance to fixed points that captures that elusive, sticky point of understanding between experience, time, and physical space.