November 14 – December 13, 2025

Jaimie Robson

Uprooted

Uprooted is an immersive installation that explores the notion of home and belonging at a time of wildfires, uncertainty and uprooting. It contemplates the grandeur of British Columbia’s ancestral forests and evokes collective loss and grief in relation to impending climate change. The project poses questions about environmental change, and the complexities of our relationship with the land we live on. The installation combines intricate paper cutouts with projected light to create interactive and participatory experience.

The central piece in the exhibition is comprised of more than one hundred miniature houses, each intricately cut from black paper. Suspended from the ceiling, these blackened homes hang in uncertainty, while simultaneously creating a dream-like environment. They may recall suspended shelters from our childhood or evoke memories of home, past or present. The installation is intended as a memorial of sorts – to countless homes lost, to livelihoods uprooted, and to feelings of groundedness and connection that we collectively long for. At the same time it is akin to a community house-raising project – each delicate paper home laboured over for hours or days in the making process. This subject matter is as personal as it is political, with the legacy of colonial approaches to forest management posing imminent threat to small communities.

This is accompanied by a series two-dimensional paper cutouts. These lace-like forms play with patterns and imagery drawn from up close investigations of moss and lichen formations – resilient rootless species that tend to be the survivors of wildfire – amongst the first to repopulate after mass devastation. These cutouts sway slightly with the movement of the air and layer with other imagery in the gallery depending on the position of the light source. Their imagery places the viewer so up close that the forest floor now becomes a series of textile-like patterns for the viewer to become immersed or lost in, blanketing the gallery walls as well as the viewer themselves. When cast in shadow this imagery envelopes us, playing with the tension between the micro and the macro as well as that between the 2D and the 3D plane. They are at once drawings, paper cutouts, and sculptures that convey both fragility and resilience, echoing that of the natural world.

This current exhibition builds on the shadow-based work Jaimie has been creating with Mere Phantoms Studios over the past twelve years (https://www.merephantoms.com/). It is the first iteration of a longer-term creative-research process.

Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal. I use traditional craft-based techniques to create contemporary artworks and installations. The artworks in this exhibition represent my ongoing interest in working with cut paper in relation to elements of light and shadow. Having grown up on the BC’s west coast, the mossy forest floor is the most comforting place I can conjure and is one I return to often —both in my imagination and real life

My work is inspired by the natural world and by the fragility and complexity inherent within notions of home and belonging. Uprooted explores the intersection between these two concerns. The abstracted images that made up the surfaces of the fragile paper structures emerged from microscopic explorations of the forest floor. This perspective opened a pathway to exploring climate anxiety, uncertainty and solastalgia—the distress and grief one feels when their home environment is altered beyond their control.

Viewers can interact with the intricate paper cutouts of imaginary natural forms and clustered houses indirectly, using projected light. The shadowy transformations of scale, movement and complexity invite reflection on themes of home, loss and resilience.

Artist Biography

Jaimie Robson is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in cut paper/shadow, and porcelain. In 2011 she co-founded the artist collective Mere Phantoms, along with Atelier Make, a ceramics studio in Montreal. She completed her BFA at Emily Carr University (2002) and an MA (Media Studies) at Concordia University 2012. She has exhibited in Canada and internationally including the Istanbul Biennial (2013), Brandts Museum (Denmark, 2015), Grunt Gallery (2017), Hamilton Art Inc, and Surrey Art Gallery (2022). Jaimie has led numerous neighbourhood-based public art projects and brings participatory practices elements into her work.

Audio Component:

Red Cedar at Trans Mountain Trail, soundscape, 2021, by Branching Songs; soundscape, 5:36min, 2021

The soundscape included in the exhibition is composed from recordings made at the Trans Mountain property line trail in Burnaby, BC. The soundscape positions the listener as a precarious Red Cedar at the frontline of ever-expanding resource extraction. Geophonic recordings from the base of their roots vibrate with the thrum of construction from the new Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project facility, as above-ground ambisonic recordings hear casual trail enjoyers, far-flung industrial noise, and wind stirring their branches. Touch interactions using contact mics between the composers and tree add textural embodiment and pick up bird calls through the tree’s bark.

FUNDING CREDITS:

Canada Council for the Arts; Conseil des arts et des lettres du Canada.