The public art of Hillcrest
IIn 2020, in response to the closing of public spaces due to the pandemic, Nicole Bauberger created a gallery on the trails behind her house in Hillcrest. She named it the Dalton Trail Trail Gallery. She filled the trees with ceramic dresses, and ravens made of recycled rubber and clay. The site became a place for trail users to engage with art when all of the indoor galleries in town were closed.
Almost six years after I first wrote about the gallery, I revisited it one day this December with Bauberger. The focal piece in the space is Finding Our Way, a dress with a framework of wire onto which hundreds of strips of orange flagging tape are tied. As we stand next to the work, Bauberger removes more strips of tape that hang in the trees and attaches them to the dress. It’s forever a work in progress.
Bauberger conceived of Finding Our Way in 2021 after the discovery of what was believed to be 215 children who were buried at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. At the time, some people decided to remember the children by wearing orange shirts on Canada Day. Bauberger was motivated to create an art piece that encourages a deeper reflection on our “unequally shared heritage of colonization.” This sentiment is expressed through a cardboard sign hung next to Finding Our Way: “Let’s keep finding ways to live here together. Orange Shirt Day, every day.”
Bauberger meant for the project to continue until July 31, 2021, but even today, people continue to add orange strips to the branches by using a roll of flagging tape that Bauberger has hung there.
The gallery has also become a gathering place for students from Elijah Smith Elementary School, who use the site for activities around the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and for commemorations related to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. These uses suggest that Finding Our Way continues to have a meaningful impact in the community.
“It’s not merely performative,” Bauberger says, “It seems to be serving some sort of purpose.”
My visit that day also included a stop at the playground in Hillcrest Park, just a short walk from the Dalton Trail Trail Gallery. There, Bauberger, with the help of some of her neighbours, has installed another public art piece that the artist conceived of several years ago. Dubbed the Winter Garden, the work consists of a number of cardboard-based paintings of flowers, animals, landscapes, hearts—all made by children in workshops led by Bauberger, with one guest leader over the years.
The Winter Garden also emerged from the days of Covid, when, Bauberger says, people needed “moments to connect in a good way.” She cut open an old bike box and invited neighbourhood kids to draw flowers on it. Then she cut the flowers out for a garden.
From there, the garden continued to grow in post-pandemic times. For a few years, the Winter Garden was a Kids Kreate program at the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC), and the cardboard pieces were installed in the garden around the YAC. Another version was made by students at Grey Mountain Primary School. Since the beginning, Bauberger has gathered the pieces, at the end of winter, placed them in totes and brought them out for installation the next year.
Similar to Finding Our Way, the Winter Garden requires community engagement to bring it into being. The garden has become an annual event, now, in Hillcrest, where the community association supports workshops for creation in the fall and for installation in the winter. The haphazard arrangement of the garden is thanks to the volunteers placing pieces as they like, without any preconceived plan.
Bauberger accepts her lack of control in the process, just as she accepts every painting without judgement. “The diversity of things is what’s so great about it,” she says.
The many small works that make up the garden have endured months of Yukon winters. And surprisingly so, because the Winter Garden works are small paintings on cardboard, which one might think would succumb to the elements. However, the cardboard is surprisingly resilient. When they are finally too damaged to install, the paintings are recycled after having spent many winters in the greenspace and out of the waste stream.
While the most obvious connection I find between Finding Our Way and the Winter Garden is the community participation in their creation, Bauberger identifies another less explicit relationship. For many years, she has worked to situate her art practice in a way that doesn’t take away from Indigenous creators. In the case of the garden, the colourful cardboard flowers pay a quiet tribute to Indigenous beadwork artists whose beautiful floral designs can bring joy in the dark northern winters.
“The Winter Garden is, to a reasonable degree, inspired by the practices of a bunch of Indigenous art that I’ve seen,” Bauberger explains. “It doesn’t copy it, but when I look at beautiful beaded mitts, they all have floral motifs on them.
“You can tell a whole bunch of stories about what those motifs are about, but they’re also flowers when there are no flowers. They’re imaginary flowers that give us the strength to get through winter.”
For Bauberger, both the Winter Garden and Finding Our Way are part of her efforts to “[try] to be a non-Indigenous artist in a way that doesn’t make Indigenous art invisible.
“They are both gestures in that direction,” she says.
If you would like to visit the Dalton Trail Trail Gallery, located behind 151 Dalton Trail, it’s always open!
