“We created this workshop not to enrich the community, but to build community,” co-founder of Fleeting Form Studio Hannah Marder-MacPherson said at the onset of the group’s inaugural event on Sept. 6. The organization, supported by McGill’s Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF), is hosting a series of six workshops inviting various artists to share their work, followed by creation sessions and discussions with the goal of fostering climate action through art.
Their first workshop invited artist Tina Marais—a visual artist who creates large, intricate textile pieces—to explore the theme of environmental change and degradation. After a brief lecture from Marais, the roughly 30 attendees broke out into discussion groups. The workshop ended with each attendee sewing together a small horn-like denim structure, guided by Marais, which she will put together into a collective piece.
Evelyn Logan, U2 Arts, told The Tribune that she was initially drawn to the workshop by her interest in fine arts, but she was pleasantly surprised by the community-building she found.
“I feel like we’re at a point where community is something that we all thirst for,” Logan said. “It’s so important to have even small-scale events like this, where you can meet new people and just feel a sense of oneness with the people that you meet and with the spaces that surround you.”
Fleeting Form Studio is the brainchild of McGill undergraduate students Saskia Morgan, Ava Williams, and Marder-MacPherson. The idea came from a project Morgan and Williams worked on for the class FSCI 198: Climate Crisis and Climate Actions. Over the summer, they decided to pursue it and applied for funding from the SPF.
The SPF is a fund valued at about $1 million CAD annually and supports students and faculty members’ sustainability initiatives on campus. Since its inception in 2010, it has provided funding to over 350 projects, including McGill Feeding McGill and Campus Crops. The funding comes from a $0.55 CAD-per-credit student fee from the Students’ Society of McGill University, the Macdonald Campus Students’ Society, and the Post-Graduate Students’ Society. Money received from student fees is then matched by the university.
“The Sustainability Projects Fund is a valuable resource that catalyzes student ideas into reality,” Shona Watt, Associate Director, Operations & Engagement at the McGill Office of Sustainability wrote to The Tribune.
For Fleeting Form Studio, aid from the SPF went beyond just financial support. The organizers told The Tribune that they also got help brainstorming their idea and finding a space to hold it in: McGill’s Critical Media Lab.
“If I tried to do this project alone, it would just be lacking so much of the beauty that we created together,” Morgan said. “Every step of the way, I’ve felt so inspired that the SPF is there. I think it’s one of the best assets that McGill has—a platform for students to take action themselves.”
As students in fields such as Environment and Geography, the trio felt their coursework had disproportionately focused on the environmental degradation caused by humans with little emphasis on society’s capacity for change. This is a pedagogical gap they hope to fill.
“You get no inspiration from destruction, you just get despair, and that’s not a way to go about solving any problems,” Marder-MacPherson said. “So finding that unity in creation and that inspiration in creation is really what we wanted to do with this project.”
For Morgan, Williams, and Marder-MacPherson, fostering a space for dialogue and creativity is crucial when trying to spur climate action.
“Life […] is just full of compromises and you have to forge that safe space for yourself,” Marder-MacPherson said. “You’re always going to be operating within institutions bigger than yourself that make decisions and have financial power […] and that doesn’t mean that you can’t […] forge your own path that is still working to create something that’s very safe and very beautiful.”
