Sheltering as Radical Care
An Embassy Cultural House Community Project led by Michelle Wilson and Mikaila Stevens
Sheltering as Radical Care, an Embassy Cultural House community participatory project led by London artists Michelle Wilson and Mikaila Stevens, was publicly launched on November 9, 2024 at an Antler River Rally clean-up at Greenway Park. More than 80 people assembled to remove garbage from the riverbeds of the Deshkan Ziibi, and the artwork, a quilt-like tarp created from fused reclaimed plastics, acted as a shelter for celebratory doughnuts and coffee provided by DoughEV. The artwork and launch were made possible through a grant from the Ontario Arts Council’s Artists in Communities and Schools Projects awarded to the Embassy Cultural House. This project was in partnership with Indwell Affordable Housing Projects in London and Antler River Rally
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Interview with Michelle Wilson and Mikaila Stevens
with Jessica Irene Joyce Jessica: How did you become artistic collaborators?
Mikaila: I think we’ve just been in community spaces for a while. Michelle, you asked me about a year ago? To meet with you? And then I was just immediately on board. Michelle: Yeah, I guess I became a fan online, like everybody. And then going to Punk Rock Flea Market and Old East Village events, and meeting you there, but it’s such a chaotic way to meet someone. Mikaila: Yeah, and we’ve spoken online. Especially during Covid and the lockdown, you would talk with people online and then you meet them in person. And we also met at the shop! Michelle: Yeah, the shop. That’s Rezonance Printing. I think I saw that you, Mik, had been actively seeking out workshop teaching opportunities through Museum London, and through Eldon House, and Sheri Osden Nault had you come and teach in their studio class at Western University, and then I was like, ‘this is the project’. Jessica: From what impulses or ideas was this project born? Michelle: I went to an artist residency on Toronto Island at Gibraltar Point, it was a MOTHRA residency. One of the other artists there, Tim Abel, was experimenting with using fused plastics to make small quilts. So I was thinking about how to use that plastic. Jamelie and Ron remembered that I had earlier expressed an interest in working with the Embassy Commons, Indwell’s affordable housing project, and asked if I had a project to propose to the Embassy Cultural House. Julie Ryan, Indwell’s community outreach coordinator was very involved in these discussions about hosting art workshops with the ECH. This felt like a great way to start to experiment with those ideas and processes and how to use them in the community. I had been involved with river clean-ups with Tom Cull and Miriam Love’s Antler River Rally. There I saw the magnitude of the plastics and garbage that were being pulled out of the river. At the same time, debates about unhoused people and their shelters were such a flashpoint in the city, and Indwell is mostly housing people who have previously been unhoused. There was some confluence of things happening that brought this all together. Mikaila: For me, coming into it, it was a really big learning experience and an opportunity to do something totally different. I was interested from the start. Coming in as a collaborator, I always said ‘I’m just happy to be here,’ because it was a really interesting process from start to finish. And really eye-opening for all the community and social programs, because I love Old East Village and I love that whole area. I’m from the other side of town but I always say that my second house is the print shop. Learning from other artists and learning from Michelle’s process was a really valuable experience. Michelle: I answered your question by saying how materially, this was the project that I came to pitch to Indwell and to Mik and to ECH. Once we got there and were all together, it was just the catalyst to be together and to think through this kind of making and to a large extent, once we were in the room, so many people were bringing their own ideas. Jessica: At the earlier launch for participants, the two of you spoke briefly about some technique-based troubleshooting that was necessary to materialize the project. Would you say that developing this new technical methodology was the biggest challenge during the project or did you have other challenges that came up along the way? Mikaila: We both found that communicating what the project was, was a little bit confusing. People would come and ask, “What are you guys doing?” and we would be like, “What are we doing?” We had initially planned for the participants to be sewing all the pieces together but I don’t think we realized the extent of sewing involved – that was something that was really fun and challenging. The creation process was really different from what I was expecting–but in a good way. Michelle: Getting participants in the door, and to stay, to trust themselves to just start. So we just had to start making, and then when they saw what we were doing, it was easier to get people to get hands on materials. I was second-guessing myself when we got there, thinking that maybe we needed to have a template and that would make it automatically turn out to be a thing that resembled a tarp that we could then put up and gather under. It was important that it wasn’t just a thing that was going to hang on the wall, that it was a place that we could gather under. It’s an intimate little gathering space. Jessica: What were the highlights of the participatory workshops and the overall process of creating this artwork? Mikaila: I really enjoyed the way that people just wanted a space to create together and express themselves in a different way. The way that textile art, because it is almost like a textile art, mixed with community was clear to me. I was also seeing something I didn’t expect, and maybe that was just naivety. So many Indigenous people who were very proud of their culture and their heritage were there wanting to express that through the art. It was a bit melancholy, and it was also good being together. It was sad because it was such a predominant number of the people I was seeing who were unhoused. But it was nice too, because I think it shows the resilience and the importance of art and culture and continuous opportunities for people to do that work. Jessica: I remember seeing, in the middle of the artwork, a medicine wheel and a word that was collaged underneath it–was it ‘triumph’? Mikaila: Yeah, it was ‘triumph’. When I was sewing the squares together, I made an active effort to centralize the participants and their stories. The particular person who made that one was really impactful for me. I thought it was a great representation of the six workshops we had. To get to honour, even little pieces of workshops, that was something I didn’t expect, to be so moved by what was happening. Michelle: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about this book, Inciting Joy (2022), and in it, Ross Gay writes that we think about joy happening in ‘perfect white hermetic spaces with candles lit and fluffy duvets’ but really, you know, joy happens when we sit with one another and hold each other in our grief and find laughter and eat doughnuts. It was heavy at times and we had to hold space for grief often. But then also there was music and doughnuts and laughing. Jessica: Since the river is at the heart of this project, can you each tell me about your relationships to the Deshkan Ziibi? Michelle: Becoming attuned to The Coves was my entry point for thinking more deeply about the river. Sara Mai Chitty and Summer Bresette did a podcast interview together through the Office of Indigenous Initiatives open access learning course and they talked about how the river runs through Western University and, not everyone that I’ve talked to about this sees it the same way but the riverbed itself is kind of unceded territory. The treaties that were signed that made London possible explicitly did not include the riverbed. That’s often not talked about. Also thinking about access to clean drinking water, and living in a city that a river runs through, where we do not draw our water from it, but the First Nations communities whose land we are on do, and many have not had safe drinking water consistently for generations. Also, I love the river, I have taken my kayak on it, I’ve taken canoes down it. It’s such an amazingly lively place. But because it’s ‘dirty nature,’ like Tom Cull says, people either don’t see it or they are disgusted by it, and I just think, ‘what an impoverished way to live’. Mikaila: I’ve heard similar things, I think. Bodies of water are habitable spaces for communities and Indigenous communities. Wherever you see water, there are probably communities around. I feel like there’s a lot of power in the water itself. Getting to live in a city that has a river that runs right through it is really important and it’s very hard to hear the negative about it. It’s important to let the positive in too. A water source is so integral to community, to survival, just every aspect of life, it’s great to be able to honour it in the way that we can now. Hopefully this will continue to grow that relationship for other people too. People would react really positively when we told them that the plastic we were using was collected from the river and how it is representative of what the clean-up process is - the work that the Antler River Rally and the Coves Collective does. When you can visually see that, and I mean you walk by and see garbage all the time, but when you really see it and you’re using it, there’s the literal recycling aspect. I think it’s great and on a personal note, I love water, so it’s a privilege to have that really incredible water source. Michelle: It’s funny when you’re on the clean-ups, and Tom Cull can attest to this, every time people will say, “you know the garbage is just gonna come back, right?” And it does, it makes me think about how this kind of work is an emergent strategy, right? We can’t wait for an entire systemic change, like if that’s what we need to do something, then we’re just going to sit here and watch it all burn. We have to do what we can and see how those strategies mesh with one another and how those acts of care, those ripples, can lead to something. Mikaila: My whole thing, my mindset too, is also kind of ignoring the fact that people are saying, “Oh the water is unsafe!” It’s just going to get worse if people aren’t making those active efforts. It’s important to note that this isn’t necessarily individual people, it’s a lot of garbage, and it’s systemic. I think most problems, if you really boil it down, are systemic. And I don’t think anything gets changed unless you have people responding, “Well yeah the garbage is going to come back, but we’ll be back also.” Jessica: Caring implies an ongoing relationship, right? It’s an ongoing verb. You are obviously passionate about caring, and you are teaching others how to notice and care too. I think a lot about how lack of care is tied to lack of education. Most people that I know, when they learn about an injustice, they have an emotional response to it. Sometimes they just need to be shown how they can act on that feeling. There are so many environmental and social injustices in the world that it is easy, once one starts paying attention, to become overwhelmed and ‘shut down’. These kinds of workshops are giving people practical actions that they can take while in community with one another. Michelle: And I wonder how much of that care work is already happening, and that people just don’t think about it because they don’t value it. Framing the action as artmaking demonstrates that even these small gestures matter and are important work. Jessica: Is there anything else that you’d like to make sure is mentioned? Mikaila: One thing that I thought was really good to see was the participation from the people at Indwell’s Embassy Commons and Woodfield Gate come together and how that really impacted the overall attendance, because they have a good trust between them. It was really nice to come together from all different backgrounds. I love seeing the similarities and feeling very connected to everybody. It was mostly a happy and encouraging place to be. It was fun to see how excited mostly everyone was that we were coming to do these workshops and how excited they were to be participating. I didn’t know what to expect, it was just a really good environment. |
Mikaila Stevens points to a plastic quilted square with a Medicine Wheel.
Photo credit: Jessica Irene Joyce 
The completed artwork can be suspended from trees to create a small shelter. Photo credit: Michelle Wilson
Sheltering in action: the completed art object shelters volunteers at the Antler River Rally clean-up at Greenway Park on November 9, 2024.
Photo credit: Jessica Irene Joyce 
Mikaila Stevens is a Mi’kmaq contemporary beadwork artist, graphic designer, printmaker, and storyteller currently creating on the banks of the Deshkan Ziibi (London, ON). She is known for her small business, Flourish and Grow, which sells beadwork and printed clothing created from her original designs.
Michelle Wilson (@michellemargaretwilson) is a queer, neuro-divergent, settler artist, and mother currently residing in London, Ontario. She received her PhD in Visual Art from Western University. Her work focuses on artistic collaboration as anti-colonial care work, making space for diverse hands to come together through creation. Michelle combines ancestral practices with new media to create immersive, anti-ableist environments that engage the senses and provoke introspection. Jessica Irene Joyce (she/her) is an artist, PhD student of Art and Visual Culture at Western University and contributing editor at the Embassy Cultural House. She paints to document relationships to self, materials, and ecologies, and how these are transformed by reading about and living through the impacts of climate change. For more information about her work, please visit her website.
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