Gardening, Not Architecture was a live music performance where I created improvised sounds in collaboration with other people and a grapefruit plant that I planted from seed. 

 

The experiment is part of a PhD research-creation project called The Lake Shift: Imagining Musical Collaboration with the Great Lakes. This project began a long time ago, as an imaginary. I had imagined a story in which the Great Lakes were the main characters. I wondered what they might say to each other and to us. When I came to Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), my project quickly changed from imagining ways to personify the lakes, or speaking for them, to one of exploring ways to collaborate with them musically. 

 

This experiment or exercise, was designed to explore the possibility of collaboration with more-than-humans; is it possible, how will I know if it is occurring, what are the ethical concerns and how might I gain consent from a plant?

 

John Hartigen’s 2018 text: How to Interview a Plant discusses ways of sensing and observing plants as ways to address plants as ethnographic subjects.(1) He suggests the these complimentary methods of sensory observation: first by concentrating one’s attention and facilitating looking by drawing the plant, then, conversely, letting your attention spread out and wait to find out what comes towards us.(2)

 

As an artist, I have always found that in rendering something, you come to know it in a different way – different from other media (prose, photography, sculpture, etc.) Drawing something forces you to spend concentrated time with a subject and look at it while suspending judgment.

 

Part of my fieldwork for the past two summers has involved traveling around the lakes and, along with making field recordings, using a biodata sonification device that musicalizes the electrical activity in the plants and water in and around the lakes. I bring the field recordings into the studio and respond to them musically. I include the activity of making diaristic watercolours paintings in response to each site I visit. These are also brought into the studio sessions and used very loosely as graphic notation.

 

It is only very recently that I have invited other human musicians to explore how we might develop musical relationships with nature. 

 

This video documents two short improvised pieces with Brad Kilpatrick, Omar Shabbar, our vegetal friend and myself, performed on May 14, 2025, at a symposium for faculty and students of the Media and Design Innovation PhD program at TMU.

 

1 – Hartigan Jr., John. Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/55913., 253

2 – Hartigan Jr., John. Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/55913., 255

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