Festival Exhibition

September 5 - October 4, 2025, Sunshine Coast Arts Center

We emerged from the sea, and we are the sea, our blood has a chemical composition analogous to that of the sea of our origins.[1] When we describe the Salish Sea as a noun – bounded by land, a surface to move over, a resource to extract from – we stop being in deep relation to the complex interconnectedness that bounds us to her.

The salt waters of the Salish Sea are threaded through the estuaries and waterways, into the rivers and creeks that run through the forests that extend into the mountains and beyond. That spawning salmon “feed” forests, their decaying bodies importing vast stores of nitrogen to the ecosystem via food webs, asks us to move beyond considering the components of an ecosystem—trees or fish or bears—to seeing the interconnections of its parts. Salmon DNA have been detected in the yearly growth of ancient trees. Some of these same salmon may travel upto 1,300kms in a six-year journey, adapting between fresh and salt water, only to know, through ancient intelligence, to return to the same stream they were born in, their decaying bodies bringing ocean nutrients to the mosses, herbs, shrubs and trees that grow along the waterways. This is the grammar of animacy – dissolving the sense of distance between her and us, dissolving the inherited restrictions of knowing about her, to coming to know with her, because we view ourselves in a relationship of ecological compassion.[2]

In 2022, the body of a young fin whale was recovered by the shíshálh nation, and after careful work, its preserved skeleton was installed at the tems swiya musum earlier this year. A member of the second largest mammal family in the world, this deep-sea relative died as a result of a collison with a boat. As a “messenger from the sea”[3], what can we learn from this whale, and from the practices of care that unfolded by the shíshálh Nation following the discovery? This “Ambassador of the Deep Sea” (xwamstut ?e te tl'ep te sinkwu) prompted us to think about their home in Sinku - the she shashishalhem word for “open water”, or what we commonly call the Salish Sea today. So it is with Sinku as our companion for thinking-with, that the Festival Exhibition brings together artists whose work expresses the inter-relationships between forests, rivers and oceans.  

Exploring the function of fungus and the delicate threads of the mycelium networks of communication and consciousness, Valerie Durant’s work makes visible the invisible connections of diverse collaborations and inclusivity that nourish the forest below the surface. These connections remind us of human interconnectedness with nature, urging us to foster a symbiotic relationship with our environment to protect both ourselves and our ancestors.

Hadis Fard is drawn to the devasted landscapes of clearcuts in Robert’s Creek. For her, forests are not simply collections of trees. They are complex, interdependent systems where vertical diversity -- canopy, understory, root, and soil -- sustains life. When deforestation occurs, this layered structure collapses. The same is true under colonialism: when cultures, languages, and peoples are erased, a vital system of global diversity is severed. Colonial systems not only take land, they rewrite meaning, and extract from the force of life. She invites us to listen again, and to remember as resistance to this erasure.

Since moving to the coast, artist and musician Tegan Ceschi-Smith has been meditating on our relationship and responsibility to the ocean and all of the creatures that live in and depend on it. Her watercolour meditations, created using salt and fresh water from the Salish Sea, are an invitation to explore our environment and our relationships to those we share space with. Her paintings are a discovery of the ever-changing play of light on these incredible ocean-dwelling mammals. They bring those we rarely see into the light. 

Giorgio Magnanensi’s West Coast Radians – wood resonators – bring a soundscape of shíshálh elder Robert Joe and master weaver Jessica Silvey’s stories of Sinku and the Salish Sea. Their generous sharing of stories through their lives lived along and with the Salish Sea weave traditions with personal memories, expressing their deep interconnectedness to the shíshálh swiya.

[1] Italo Calvino, Blood, Sea

[2] Robin Wall Kimmerer

[3] Nanika Paul