Outdoor School

Contemporary environmental art that makes learning fun.

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Who wouldn’t want to attend the Outdoor School? As a new book of that title makes clear, right from a cover that shows people wading into a swimming hole, this is contemporary environmental art that makes learning fun. Flipping through the book reveals joyful photographs: people foraging for mushrooms, orienteering in an art museum, working in organic gardens, tasting heritage apples, meditating with beehives, sharing food by a campfire and even milking a goat. 

While the artists featured in Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art are clearly concerned about environmental issues, they typically seek ways to encourage experiential learning in nature, with help from birders, naturalists, scientists and other experts outside the arts. Their approach offers respite from gloom-and-doom scenarios that play out in the news, often miring us in a collective lassitude of resignation. The lively, communal and embodied pre-pandemic projects documented here seem hopeful, which is all the more poignant during this fourth energy-sapping wave of COVID-19, as we are encouraged yet again to socially distance, even out in nature. 

Compiled by editors Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell, and published by Douglas & McIntyre, the book takes its name from an arts course first taught by Borsato in 2014 at the University of Guelph. Morrell used a similar model when he taught later at the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada University. Outdoor School was also the title of an exhibition he organized at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus in 2016, and a residency the duo led with Indigenous artist Tania Willard at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2018. 

Morrell, in his opening essay, notes the importance of attuning the body to nature, as well as honing our powers of observation and movement. The aim is not to create a landscape painting or photograph the outdoors, or even to use natural materials to create sculptures, he emphasizes, but to help shape an alternative outdoor culture. “At this moment, the very activity of going outside – whether it’s to disconnect from our laptops and devices or to assert access to certain spaces – can be a radical decolonial gesture,” he writes. “It is also a way of practising being together in relation to our surroundings.”

But that said, outdoor culture in Canada is largely synonymous with whiteness, as Morrell notes, and is heavily influenced by European concepts of land ownership and class aspirations. And, as a trip to any outdoors store will confirm, consumerism. “Social inequality and systemic racism have also all but ensured wilderness areas and many outdoor activities have been largely inaccessible to people of colour, and this is further entrenched by histories of discrimination around property ownership,” he writes. “Ironically, the outdoors is one of the most colonized of all spaces, and yet it is where we might look if we want to imagine ways of being together that challenge these injustices and the persistent mythologies that conceal them.”

The book takes a peek at BUSH Gallery, a conceptual collaborative Indigenous space for dialogue and experimental practice located, as its name suggests, on the land. The gallery’s manifesto, written by Tania Willard, Peter Morin, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Jeneen Frei Njootli, is reproduced in whole. In their vision, it's essentially a space for dialogue, experimental practice and community-engaged work that considers how gallery systems and art media can be transformed by Indigenous knowledges, traditions and aesthetics.

Outdoor School offers a generous assortment of photographs, interspersed with interviews, essays and artist statements. The overall effect is more like rooting through a stack of submissions for a residency program than reading a conventional book with a clear structural logic supported by its design. The strength of this approach is that it protects individual voices and allows idiosyncratic visions. The drawbacks? Visual artists are not necessarily gripping writers, and the wealth information can feel overwhelming. If you’re looking for a metaphor – it’s an overgrown garden, not quite natural but not fully colonized, either. 

One could argue this is appropriate for an endeavour trying to shift familiar storylines and hierarchical structures, encouraging us to think about art not as a product but a practice of going outside, sharing knowledge, relationship and gratitude. But while I wanted to read this book, I kept picking it up and putting it down until, finally, a sudden gap in this magazine's publishing schedule propelled me to bushwhack through. As with a hike, much of the charm is in the things you discover along the way, whether tucked down a mossy bank or spotted through a gap in the bushes. For instance, Borsato’s tour to identify cloud formations in Canadian landscape paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario captured my imagination, as did a brief account of The Great Chorus, a project Toronto-based artist Bill Burns undertook with 70 students, who developed and performed an experimental libretto after going behind the scenes at the Royal Ontario Museum. It prompted me to go online to hear the children chanting and yipping like coyotes. I also adored the photo of Vancouver-based Hannah Jickling paddling a boat made from a giant pumpkin. There was more, of course, but too much to cover in a short review.

Oh, and that cover? The photograph was taken when Borsato invited physicists meeting at the Banff Centre to join visual artists in the glacial waters of the Bow River one hot summer day, a mingling of two very different communities. “We took off almost all of our clothes and laughed and screamed, united by the shared experience of having our bodies in icy water,” she says. Calling the outing thrilling and unforgettable, “a shared trial that created instant connectedness,” she wonders: “If this gentle collision – of worlds and bodies and weather – could work, what else might be possible?” ■  

Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art, edited by Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato: Douglas & McIntyre, 2021.

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