The Power Plant

In this edition of Cross Circuits, a series that invites thinkers from beyond the visual arts to respond to our exhibitions, Catriona Sandilands, a professor in York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, brings her perspective as an environmental humanities scholar to Emmanuel Osahor’s exhibition, To dream of other places. Osahor’s lush, contemplative paintings explore beauty as a form of survival and sanctuary, often centring gardens as spaces of care, contemplation, and remembering. Drawing on her work in feminist ecologies and critical plant studies, Sandilands begins with a story about the gift of a rhubarb plant to consider the layers of memory tangled up in the gardens we grow, and the ones we carry inside us.

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a professor of Environmental Arts and Justice in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. Her research, graduate supervision, and teaching interests lie in the interdisciplinary environmental humanities, including environmental literatures and ecocriticism; queer, multispecies and feminist ecologies; critical plant studies and botanical biopolitics; public humanities; and creative writing practice.