Art meets nature this Sunday as the Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary celebrates Earth Day.
The event features Eco Art projects created and designed especially for the sanctuary by creative studies students and faculty from UBCO.
A project of The Eco Art Incubator, this event features 20 creative studies students who will launch a series of Eco Art surprises and invite the public to participate in creative projects that will heighten awareness of the sanctuary’s role in conservation.
Visitors will have the chance to listen to plays on mp3 players, participate in a bird poetry writing lab, read an alternate “disaffected” field guide with strange legends, and experience another surprising intervention that will raise awareness and provide guests to the sanctuary with a quirky souvenir of their visit.
The Eco Art Incubator is a research initiative run by Nancy Holmes, associate professor of creative writing, and Denise Kenney, assistant professor of interdisciplinary performance — both from the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus.
The goal is to grow Eco Art in the Okanagan and to make the region an important centre of Eco Art production. The Bishop Sanctuary celebration is the first project of the Incubator in the North Okanagan.
Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary has also invited other community arts groups to create other special Earth Day events. The site is operated by Bishop Wild Bird Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to conservation and stewardship of wild bird habitat, primarily in the North Okanagan.
Sunday’s free event is open to all and takes place from noon to 4 p.m. The sanctuary is at 12408 Coldstream Creek Rd. in Coldstream, on the shores of Kalamalka Lake.
For more information about the Eco Art project, contact Holmes at 250-807-9369 or e-mail nancy.holmes@ubc.ca, or see http://ecoartincubator.com/ For more information about the sanctuary contact Aaron Deans at 250-542-5122.
