The Broken Forest Eco-Artist Group and interested invited Artists will participate in a 10-day artistic residency in the last weeks of August, 2025. This residency focuses on discussion and processes without the pressure of completing specific works for exhibition during the residency. The aim would be to explore our art, ideals, and notions around activism, and how these help us to form connections with the forest.

The emphasis of the planned programs, workshops, discussions and site visits would be on:

1. 1. the process of creating art in nature;
   2. how to convey our messages for awareness-building and to promote meaningful dialogue leading to change and better practices in forestry, mining and other extraction industries that affect the forest;
   3. how to form lasting (and helpful) relationships with the surrounding communities;
   4. ways and means of supporting each other in our efforts to explore artistic themes and possibilities.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

.Artwork and photograph: Gwen MacGregor

Participants will, over the course of the residency, explore what Eco-Artist’s messages could be, can be and cannot be. The group will question whether there is space for poetry, open-endedness, and/or interpretation in the art we create. The Clearcut Reanimated Project in August, 2024 allowed our group to understand the “realities” of creating work in the public domain (that is also not “possessed” by landowners or businesses) and “sharing” these sometimes endangered spaces with other users. We learned so much from this week-long action in a clearcut logging patch near Jordan River, B.C. that we hope to “process” and gestate those experiences. This residency will allow us to evaluate and really think about how we did the project; we can look at what worked and what didn’t, and record elements of the dialogic process to help us in future endeavours. The Actions Supporting Forests Residency will give us time to evaluate and learn from what we did in 2024 and from other Broken Forests Eco-Artists projects like: Escarpment/Erasure (2023) and Endangered Boreal (2022)