Grazing builds on past collaborative work of Meech Boakye and Evelyn Austin, whose handmade website Slow Living Cookbook (2022), collected a year’s worth of shared journal entries and biomaterial recipes, in response to ongoing crises. In this extended, spatial project, Austin and Boakye play with the concept of grazing—the act of animals feeding on growing vegetation—as an analogy for curious, slow research. Presented as an assemblage, Grazing gathers archived family photos, foraged grasses and herbs, raw wool and lullabies, to invite audiences to feel comfort within bucolic imagery, organic materials and ambient field recordings. Just as the artists’ respective practices consider relationships amongst multispecies kin and implications with the politics of extraction, the project ruminates on the deceptive potential of nostalgia and pastoral yearning.
For more information read Grazing, an essay by writer Ashley Culver and On Coagulating Milk, a digital accompaniment from Ruminations - A Fresh Cheesemaking Workshop.
Evelyn Austin is an anglo-european settler living and working in T’karato. She holds a Hon. B.S. in Mathematics an minor in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2021). Since 2021, she has worked as the founding Director of Change Course, working to move financial institutions to stop financing fossil fuel projects. Outside work, she is involved in community organizing. Evelyn has exhibited work at Xpace Culture Centre and WhipperSnapper Gallery, and participated in the Round Table residency and the Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts. Her writing is published in Challenges in Sustainability and the National Observer.
Meech Boakye is an artist, writer and arts worker with an Hon. B.A. in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2021). They serve on the Public Art Committee at TriMet and completed a three-year term on the Board of Directors for Art Metropole. Boakye has exhibited work at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, Trinity Square Video, and the Art Gallery of Guelph. Their writing has been published in C Magazine, The Globe & Mail and various indie magazines. They reside at nün Studio, through Black Art Ecology of Portland, following a residency at the Independent Publishing Resource Center.
Video documentation by Miles Rufelds.
