Project Launch

Publication

See beeswax objects

De fond en comble (From the ground up) is a hybridization of the respective practices of two artists, Nicole Fournier and Douglas Scholes. Both artists’ intertwined interventions revealed hidden values inherent within the fallow parcel of land at the edge of Montmorency metro station, a place of condensed people movement and temporarily stayed land development. Following the maintenance practice of cleaning and multiple casting actions performed by Scholes to prepare the land, Fournier intervened by enhancing/informing/enriching the existing biodiversity. The three season long (April – September) project offered reflections on various environmental issues, including recycling, agriculture and the responsible management of our urban spaces. With an average of more than half the world’s population now living in cities and the United Nations prediction of that number rising to 66% by 2050[1], these ‘unnoticed’ sites, these edgelands[2], are one of many social, economic, political harbingers of our time.

[1] United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: 2014 revision highlights (New York: United Nations, 2014): 1.
Available online at: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Highlights/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf

[2] ‘edgelands’ defined by environmentalist Marion Shoard as “Between urban and rural stands a kind of landscape quite different from either. Often vast in area, though hardly noticed, it is characterized by rubbish tips and warehouses, superstores and derelict industrial plant, office parks and gypsy encampments, golf courses, allotments and fragmented, frequently scruffy, farmland.” From Edgelands published in Remaking the Landscape, edited by Jennifer Jenkins, Profile Books. Nov 2002.