From Harm to Harmony
Catch Wind Of It
Inspiring Action. Nurturing Artists. Building Community
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Our art exhibition, From Harm to Harmony: Catch Wind of It, seeks to amplify our artists’ messages of hope and concern to a broader audience. Troubled by the damaging carbon footprint of fossil fuels, they share a desire to encourage the shift toward more alternative energy sources in New Brunswick.
Their poetic pinwheel garden installation, created for the Third Shift — Saint John’s outdoor contemporary art festival which took place on August 19-20 2022 — is a reflection on the renewable and powerful source which is at the periphery of everything – wind.
Representing wind’s creative, transformative, kinetic, distributive, and symbiotic qualities, each artist has created a functioning pinwheel/whirligig, using their respective mediums (wood, metal, found objects, textiles etc.), to animate a uniform platform and propeller, designed and produced by Gary Crosby and Mario Doiron, woodworkers from Harm to Harmony.
To support and grow their garden, prior to Third Shift, they also led outreach activities with the community (at Kristin Singh’s Forget Me Not Art Walk on Spooner Island in Hampton, N.B.; with Josephine Saverese who led newcomer youth with the Multicultural Association of Fredericton and woman affiliated with the Elizabeth Fry Society of New Brunswick; and with Saint John youth entrepreneurs, facilitated by Abigail Reinhart), to co-create pinwheels which frame the pathway that leads to their larger installation.
Visitors to the garden were invited to follow this path as they contemplate ways in which wind can help lead us towards more harmonious relations with the earth.
During the festival itself, on Friday, Aug. 19, Bethany Reinhart and Danielle Manuel of Harm to Harmony facilitated an interactive component, in the form of another DIY pinwheel-making booth. This was outrageously popular, attracting young and old New Brunswickers alike, and allowed festival attendees to animate/design/paint/write on their own wooden pinwheels, (provided by Harm to Harmony), as they add to the garden with their own reflective messages.
Below, read the reverse poem our artists collaborated on, inspired by Patagonia’s 2020 poem on the climate crisis. Please read from top to bottom, and then bottom to top: it reads like a cautionary tale from top to bottom and then transforms into a hopeful message from bottom to top.
Nobody is listening
So don’t tell us that
We should set our sights on caring, conserving, collaborating
Because the reality is
We are disconnected from nature and each other
And we don’t trust anyone who says
We have time to make this right
Because we don’t have a choice