A Lake Story
In late September, a flotilla of 120 canoes travelled from the new mouth of Toronto’s Don River at the MVVA-designed Biidaasige Park, heading towards Lake Ontario. The floating procession paddled past the new developments at East Bayfront, looping back at the CCxA-designed Sugar Beach. Each of the canoes bore a large silk flag, dyed with materials gathered from Toronto’s shorelines.
The performance, called A Lake Story, was orchestrated by The Bentway, which stewards an urban park beneath the Gardiner Expressway. It was realized in less than a year: last winter, The Bentway received the invitation to curate a flagship performance for a new Water/Fall festival on the harbourfront. Co-executive director Ilana Altman quickly decided that instead of using The Bentway’s plazas, which are set back from the lakeshore, the piece “needed to engage the water proper as a site.”
Early in the planning process, Altman reached out to artist and activist Melissa McGill, who describes her work as “celebrating sustainable traditions and lifting up reciprocal relationships with watersheds and waterways.” McGill conceived of a work that aimed to make Toronto more aware of the shared resource of Lake Ontario, and that would come together as a “big community collaboration.” She chose the launch location—the recently renaturalized mouth of the Don River—to point to “what is being done in right relationship to waterways in this very challenging moment we’re in.” Through an open call, over 500 locals volunteered to paddle canoes and to provide on-shore support. Says McGill, “the project is a collaboration with the water, the wind, and then with many people.”
Jason Logan, founder of the Toronto Ink Company, developed the colours for the silk flags flown on each canoe by combing the city’s waterways for materials—from lake clay from the bottom of Lake Ontario to copper pipe from the Leslie Street Spit. “There’s moments when plants come together with construction waste and bits of rusted wire—so many alchemical moments of finding colour in unexpected places,” says Logan. He notes that one of the brightest colours was made from a combination of yellow flowers, some foraged from the banks of the Don River. “Tansy forms this highlighter yellow on the silk,” he says. A particularly moving moment was “seeing that glowing yellow flower colour [on the flags] when the very banks they had been made from was dead [plants].” He adds, “Each silk is a natural archive—an archive of a moment in Toronto’s history.”
Photographer Amanda Large is co-founder of doublespace photography. Her image of A Lake Story is from an ongoing series examining the diverse ways in which urban residents encounter and engage with nature in a city environment. From relatively untouched areas, to planned green spaces, to incidental ecological moments, the project explores how natural elements persist within and integrate into the built environment.
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