Seeds for Grassy Mountain
Artist: Alana Bartol in a collaboration with Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed
Medium: 400+ seed packets with seeds from plants that grow or have historically grown on Grassy Mountain, including silky lupine, silvery lupine, and rough fescue seeds.
We created a series of seed packets of plants that grow on Grassy Mountain, a mountain in what is now known as the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, that may soon become the site of the Grassy Mountain Coal Project, an open-pit metallurgical coal mine, to be operated by Australian-owned Riversdale Resources, through its wholly owned subsidiary Benga Mining. It is projected to extract 93 million tonnes of coal over 23 years. As we collected, cleaned and sorted seeds, we have been having conversations about coal mining, returning to the question: what life is lost when we bring life to a mine?
See more of Seeds for Grassy Mountain here.
About the Artists
Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Through collaborative and individual works, she creates relationships between the personal sphere and the landscape particular to this time of ecological crisis. Of English, Irish, French, Scottish, German, and Danish ancestry, Bartol is a white settler Canadian currently living in Treaty 7 territory in Mohkínstsis (Calgary).
Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed is a botanist, herbalist, educator, and artist based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Alberta, Treaty 7 Territory. Latifa’s work centers around building connections between plants and people, with the goal of establishing relationships that challenge processes of exploitive extraction and seek a more sustainable and just future. She is also the co-owner of ALCLA Native Plants, a native plant nursery that supplies regionally sourced plants and seeds.
Websites: www.latifasherbs.com and www.alclanativeplants.com
Social media: Facebook Instagram Linkedin