How far afield? is a series of campus interventions that articulate different forms of care for the landscape by exploring how we come to understand and interact with the living beings—the plants, animals, minerals—that constitute it. On the occasion of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s 50th anniversary, How far afield? addresses the multifaceted histories of the campus ecology, responding to the presence of wild and cultivated spaces, and variegated narratives of land, education, and settlement.

Growth is a familiar and frequently used analogy for education, from Friedrich Fröbel’s invention of Kindergarten (literally “children garden”) to the popular understanding of academic disciplines as “branches.” How can land-based pedagogies and experimental artistic practices complicate the relationships between a park and a school, between exploration and belonging, between proximity and distance? Examining the multiple meanings of “a field”—as a site for the cultivation of plants, as a wild and open space, and as a marker of academic disciplines—this outdoor exhibition brings together artists whose works engage with fields of knowledge and experience in various ways.

In Golboo Amani’s Garden Skool, workshops with local earthworkers operate as sites for community skill-sharing and knowledge exchange, repurposing the University’s landscape as a space rich with pedagogical potential outside the traditional classroom structure. For the first component of Garden Skool, Melisse Watson presents the workshop “Soil On Which We Stand,” identifying soil, plants, trees, and flowers as relatives, and elders, that inform the deepening of our relationships to land. Abedar Kamgari’s site-specific performance, as part of her ongoing project Finding words for the feeling, navigates the unfamiliar spaces of the campus by tracing the intimacies of human presence woven into the University’s public but often inaccessible sites. Chloé Roubert and Gemma Savio’s intervention into the campus lawn, It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look, explores the tensions between modernist architecture and green spaces by foregrounding questions of labour, landscaping, and the constructed definitions of what is natural and what is cultivated.

In works that simultaneously engage with, change, alter, and reconfigure the visible landscapes of the UTM campus, How far afield? reimagines the space of the University by asking artists and viewers to consider the value of natural spaces and the labours of living and working within them.