Music, mud and more at In the Soil
Mud met art, at In the Soil.
Lots and lots of mud. St. Catharines mud. Hamilton mud. Toronto mud. Indeed, mud from the shoreline of Lake Ontario, from just about every place in between.
At a booth along James Street on the weekend, Nicole Clouston, a PhD visual arts student at York University, was encouraging festivalgoers to create their own mud projects.
In simple terms, microscopic microbes live in the mud. And when they’re fed — in this case a diet of raw egg and newspaper — they multiply. A lot.
“When they multiply, you can see their colours,” said Clouston.
It takes about two weeks, depending on sunlight. After that, they just keep growing, she said.
At her booth, she offered varieties of mud in white plastic jars.
And when kids like four-yearold Carmen Neamtz, dropped by they pulled on blue surgical gloves and got their hands dirty. They combined all the ingredients into a small, clear tube, snapped on a lid, and walked away with a growing art project and instructions to keep it in the sun.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the booth, visual artist Rhiannon Barry was guiding people through the art of making dream catchers.
Kids could pick through a table filled with colourful beads, pieces of fabric and cord to make the dream catcher.
In the Soil marked its 10th anniversary this weekend. It featured some 400 artists and performers and 150 free and ticket events. Audiences experienced the work of contemporary and literary artists, musicians and media artists.
In the alley at the corner of James and St. Paul streets, two performers came dressed entirely in white and became the human canvasses for St. Catharines graffiti artists Chad MacDonald and Linden Imans.
Spray paint in hand, they collaborated with artists Vanita Butrsingkorn and Emily Hughes from the Toronto-based company Hercinia Arts, painting a corner wall and the two women as they moved and posed inside the artwork.
“We’re a piece of the wall,” said Butrsingkorn.
“It was about creating art while art was being created on you.”