Plant Encounters is a commissioned suite of creative works that express relationships between artists and various plants along the Ninth Avenue Trail.
Take a scroll along the map to encounter close to 30 plants. Whether you’re old friends or just meeting for the first time, we hope you come away from this collection with a deeper appreciation of each and every one.
Welcome to Plant Encounters, an online publication hosted by the Long Walk Collective, in the traditional territories of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, also known as Yukon’s Klondike.
The Ninth Avenue Trail runs along the east side of Dawson City. It is used by human and and non-human walkers, runners, wanderers, foragers.
In May 2020, the Long Walk Collective (Bo Yeung, Georgia Hammond and Meg Walker) invited artists to consider their relationships with specific plants along Dawson City’s Ninth Avenue Trail, and then create works from those connections. Though the LW Collective has dissolved, our goal remains: to create deeper intimacy understanding of the flora of the trail, even over great distances.
The result: drawings, an exciting, diverse flow of videos, music, fiction, photographs, poetry, and paintings that allow visitors to experience the plants through the eyes and ears of the artists.
We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in citizens and government for allowing this work to take place on their territory. Special thanks are due to the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in Language and Heritage Departments, especially Georgette McLeod for her work in providing plant names in Hän, the language by which they were first known on this land.
Plant Encounters invites viewers to slow down and contemplate the intricacies of peoples’ relationships with plants, as well as the particular nature of the plants themselves.
We hope this project can contribute to the larger conversations happening in so many places about human-plant reciprocity. Many thanks to the Yukon Arts Fund for encouragement and financial support.
