Six environmental artists win this year’s Rewilding Art Prize

Nicole McDonald-Fournier has a hard time displaying her art in museums. Her pieces, makeshift pots made of old winter coats used to grow plants, tend to invite worms, ant nests and mould.

“At one point, even, it attracted mice,” McDonald-Fournier says with a laugh.

McDonald-Fournier started her coat-upcycling project in 2012. Called EmballeToi!, meaning “wrap yourself up” in French, it has since been installed at locations across her Montreal hometown, including outside food banks, on the roof of cultural venue Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges and on clotheslines in front of the Fonderie Darling gallery.

And now, EmballeToi! has helped win McDonald-Fournier a Rewilding Arts Prize, which comes with an as-yet-solidified plan to put her work, alongside that of the five other winners, in an exhibition.

Created in 2023 by the David Suzuki Foundation and Rewilding Magazine (co-founded by journalist Kat Tancock and Globe content editor Domini Clark), the Rewilding Arts Prize awards $2,000 to Canadian artists whose work fits its eponymous theme. The term rewilding, which was coined in the early 1990s by the late environmental activist Dave Foreman to describe activities that promote biodiversity and sustainable solutions to climate change, applies to the art recognized by the prize in a more abstract way.

More than 650 artists submitted photos of their work demonstrating how they address environmental themes, whether that meant choosing several artworks or multiple parts of the same installation. Eight of the winners of the inaugural prize, awarded in 2024, comprised this year’s jury, which judged each applicant on their broader artistic portfolios.

The winning artists often brought nature to people in urban and suburban centres, rather than making their art in natural ecosystems where rewilding projects usually take place, says Jode Roberts, manager of the prize and other community-based rewilding programs run by the David Suzuki Foundation. Roberts says the prize is a way to recognize artists who use creative methods to raise awareness about the environment. The winners of the inaugural prize showcased their art in an exhibition at Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of Nature, and the foundation is currently discussing the next exhibition’s venue and timing with the 2026 winners.

“Traditionally, conservation groups and advocacy groups will look for artists to create a poster for a campaign or create visuals to go with the things they’re trying to advocate for,” he says. “In this case, we just wanted to shift the spotlight and kind of go fishing to see what artists are doing.”

Prizewinning Montreal-based duo Masumi Rodriguez and Elena Kirby, whose work asks people to reflect on the nuances of invasive plant species through community-based collaborative workshops, submitted PAPER LABS, an initiative that has invited volunteers into galleries in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver since 2024, to make paper out of invasive plants such as dog-strangling vine. The two artists have met many environmentally conscious community members through these workshops, from the land stewards who sourced the invasive species to the volunteers who processed plants with them.

Now, the prize is helping Rodriguez and Kirby start conversations with like-minded individuals.

All of these artists find themselves “both in an art world and an ecology world, and trying to figure out how to bridge the two,” Kirby says.

Carrie Allison echoes the sentiment, saying winning this year’s prize puts her among artists who examine and learn about the world in unique ways through experimental mediums.

Allison, who’s based in Halifax and has Métis and Cree heritage, spent months attaching beads to blocks of wood to mimic the appearance of turfgrass for her series, “they built fields of grass on sawdust.” Her work is meant to make people question the colonial legacy of lawns, she says: Turfgrass has historically been used as a status symbol, indicating both spare land and the labour to maintain it. She says she used beads to catch people off guard when they approach the installation.

“Someone wonders why I would spend so much time beading a plot of grass, and for me, I wonder why people spend so much time maintaining their plots of grass,” she says.

For other winners, the prize legitimizes creative activities rooted in their cultural heritage.

Nevada Lynn, who also uses beadwork, says the prize uplifts a medium that’s used as a healing activity in her Red River Métis community. It also helps her restore relationships with her ancestors.

Lynn made beaded maps of her family members’ birthplaces for her WE-BUFFALO series, submitted for the award. She paired these maps with buffalo teeth coated in beeswax and threaded through with wool to represent her family’s ancestral kinship with the buffalo, which were driven close to extinction in the late 19th century. She says it’s important to leverage the emotional power and relatability of art to show people those connections “as we face climate collapse.”

Xiaojing Yan, who often combines fungi with symbols or characters from Chinese mythology in her art, says that winning the prize has connected her art and its cultural references “to the larger conversation of how we live in the natural world.”

“What meant the most for me is not just winning, but feeling that this kind of work was really being seen and understood,” says Yan.

In her Lingzhi Girl series, Yan covered life-size busts of women made of wood chippings and lingzhi mushroom spores she allowed to grow for months. Yan says lingzhi mushrooms, also called reishi mushrooms, are known in Chinese folk tales to grant immortality.

“This figure exists in a state of becoming, suspended between a human and a fungal life,” says Yan, who immigrated to Canada from China. “As an immigrant, I carried my memories and my culture to this new land. The mushroom, the adaptation, the growth, all those are tied to how I adapt to a new culture.”