Liz Toohey-Wiese is a Vancouver-based artist and educator, currently on sabbatical from teaching in the Fine Arts department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

When we recently caught up with her, Toohey-Wiese had just wrapped up her solo painting exhibition, Landscapes, Let Go, at Duplex Artist Society. At the time, she was preparing to head to Vernon, where she’ll be embarking on a two-month-long stint as a visiting artist and scholar at The FEELed LAB – UBC Okanagan’s feminist environmental humanities lab. Fortunately, she had a bit of spare time to share what she’s been up to in the studio and around BC, before hitting the road.

What will you be doing at FEELed LAB and how does it relate to your current art practice?

I’ll be running some ecological grief workshops with the community there, looking at the wildfires that happened in the summer of 2023, and how art making can help process feelings of ecological anxiety and build emotional resilience around climate change.

Please tell me a bit more about your art practice, in general.

I’m primarily a landscape painter, and I’ve focused a lot on wildfires in my practice since 2018. The wildfire related artwork has taken a lot of different forms beyond painting – I’ve made postcards and billboards, sculptures and souvenir objects. I am also the co-creator and co-editor of a book called Fire Season. Along with my collaborator Amory Abbott, we curate submissions from contributors from all over the world who are reflecting on the topic of wildfires through both art and writing. Fire Season feels like a huge part of my art practice now, and the conversations around that book feel like some of the most exciting things I get to do with my art practice these days.

How has your practice changed or evolved over time? Do you have a routine or any rituals that you still stick to?

I think my work felt much more isolated 10 years ago, and now my work feels always in conversation with other people. As for routines and rituals, I’m a big fan of having a studio “uniform”. I think it tells your brain, “Ok, we’re going into creative work mode now.” My uniform is currently a pair of jeans and a paint-covered Harley Davidson sweatshirt that was gifted to me by a gold miner.

Besides landscape painting, textiles have also factored into your practice in the past. What do textiles bring into your life these days? And what element do textiles bring that perhaps painting doesn’t?

When I was doing my MFA at NSCAD University, they had a huge textiles and weaving department. I had just gotten interested in weaving on my own, teaching myself from YouTube videos mostly, and was really excited to learn how to weave on a floor loom. It ended up being a real anchor point while doing my MFA, and I made a series of blankets printed with watercolour paintings on them in my graduate thesis show. I found that weaving felt like the counterbalance to painting for me. Painting feels like this constant decision making process… every colour you mix, deciding where each paint stroke is going to go, how many, what size, does it look right in that spot? It can feel very cerebral at times. Textiles, on the other hand, felt like meditation to me. Once you set up the loom with the pattern you’ve chosen and decided on the colours you are going to use, the decision making is done. Now, you just have to put the hours in, going through repetitive motions.

I haven’t woven in a long time, but I learned how to quilt last year. I think it’s a similar draw for me as weaving; I like the meditative quality of sewing. There’s also limitations in quilting – you can only choose from the fabric you have, so it’s kind of about making the best of what you got. Also, shopping for fabric at thrift stores is a good ongoing hobby.

If you could learn any other medium and/or incorporate it into your art practice, what would it be and why?

I love ceramics a lot, and every once in a while I will take a handbuilding pottery class and just make janky candle holders or plant pots or whatever else I might like to have around my house that I have built. I find a certain freedom in working with materials that aren’t “my medium”. It helps me go back to beginner’s mind, and just make things for the pleasure of making. I also love the usefulness of ceramics, you get to interact with them everyday. I think ceramics could come into my art practice one day; there’s such a connection with clay and fire ,obviously. But I’m also happy to keep it just a playful activity.

You’ve had a good amount of attention from the media for your wildfire awareness activism over the years, and I recently watched a video of the talk you participated in last November at VPL, riffing off of the latest instalment in the Fire Season book series… You seem like a very busy woman! But obviously you have your moments when you aren’t “on”, and must spend some serious time out of the public eye to work on your art/projects. What does a typical “off” day look like for you?

I really like having my mornings free, so I usually get up early and have coffee and read. I read a lot of books on Zen Buddhism. I meditate weekly at a local Zen center, and they have a great lending library, and I always seem to have a stack of books from them that I am slowly working my way through. Honestly, if I have an off day I’ll probably head to my studio for the afternoon. A nice evening in the winter includes making a big dinner with friends, and in the summer maybe a long walk to get ice cream.

What do you do to unwind and replenish your energy?

I’m really lucky with my job as a professor to have non-teaching semesters, where I can travel across BC and do my artistic research. Over the last five years or so, this has taken the form of doing month-long artist residencies in rural communities. Technically, I guess that is work, but I get to do a lot of things in those places that replenish my energy. I’m seeing new landscapes, spending time talking with local community members, working in my studio, and spending a lot of time in nature. Those residencies often give me energy, questions, and things to think about for months or even years afterwards.

While I was watching the VPL video, I made a note of a quote of yours that stood out to me, regarding the empathic nature of artists (specifically about their emotional response to wildfires, but I think it also works in general, and has much broader implications): “We’re feeling it for everyone who can’t feel it.” With so much devastation happening in the world today, do artists have a bigger responsibility to act as a conduit for the issues and be activists, more so than the average “world citizen”?

No, I don’t think responsibility is the word. I think we just don’t really have a choice to feel it. I think empathetic people are just built that way, and a lot of artists are pretty empathetic.

I remember talking to a friend on a park bench at the end of the summer of 2021. That was the summer Lytton burnt down, and it was probably the most intense ecological grief and anxiety I had ever felt. I also felt a lot of clarity that summer about my own art practice, and why I make art about climate change. I told him: “I just want to make people feel it”. I guess the “it” is a simultaneous love for the world around us, and this sadness that the things we love seem to be slipping away before our eyes. In that VPL talk, I say that I don’t blame people for not wanting to feel it, it’s intense! And I can only dip in and out of feeling “it”. But I really think people only act on things they have had experiences with. So I hope people are having experiences of loving the natural world, and really wanting to protect something they love and to make choices that prevent the worst case scenarios in regards to climate change.

How do you re-connect to the environment on a day-to-day, routine or regular basis?

If I’m being honest, it can be hard to motivate myself to get into nature when I’m in Vancouver. Who wants to deal with the bridge traffic to go to North Van for a hike? I always say Vancouver has this gravitational pull, because when you’re in it you kind of forget the rest of BC exists. I feel myself leaving its pull when I head to the interior, probably around Hope. I’m like, ‘oh right, the rest of the world!’

I’m really lucky that I’ve made a lot of friends across BC, mostly through these periods as an artist-in-residence in these small communities, and I try as often as I can to go visit them and spend some time in smaller towns. That can be a really nice way to spend a long weekend, though not everyone wants to drive eight hours to Quesnel for three days. But I honestly love long drives.

Please tell us one fact about wildfires that you have discovered, that you think would surprise us.

It’s getting increasingly harder for journalists in Canada to go cover wildfires. Regulations are being made in the argument of public safety, and for respecting the privacy of the communities that are being devastated, but I think we are losing out on important coverage of these disasters. Or we need to strike some sort of balance. I have been thinking about this a lot in regards to the wildfires in LA, the photos and videos I’m seeing, and actually how important independant journalistic images are.

“I really don’t think of myself as an activist. Maybe that sounds weird, but I don’t relate to the word. My art practice is just a way for me to deal with the feelings I am having about climate change, and I want to make space for what other people have to say too.”

Besides wildfires, what gets you “fired up” these days?

I just finished a training through the Inside-Out Prison Exchange. Inside-Out is a program where university instructors are brought into prisons to facilitate classes with incarcerated students, and a cohort of university students from our institutions come with us. The courses are different than other university programs that come into prisons, in that “inside” and “outside” students are taught in classes together. So KPU students take their class at a prison for the semester, and there’s a big focus on group projects, community building, and bridging dialogue across differences. The training I took was really eye-opening. Most of my fellow students were from the states, which of course is a whole different ball game in terms of the prison system, and we had mentors join in our training program who were formerly incarcerated. They had gone through the Inside-Out program themselves, and are now helping train professors to establish programs like Inside-Out all over the world. It was really inspiring, and it made me think a lot about who and what education is for.

Do you remember the moment when your art practice became inextricably linked to activism? If so, please describe it to me.

I really don’t think of myself as an activist. Maybe that sounds weird, but I don’t relate to the word. My art practice is just a way for me to deal with the feelings I am having about climate change, and I want to make space for what other people have to say too.

I guess if I had to point to a moment that kind of shifted a perspective in me, it was a day I was hiking in Wells, BC back in the summer of 2021. There was wildfire smoke from a nearby fire hanging around in the Bowron Valley, and I was hiking on a beautiful July afternoon where the wildflowers were in full bloom, the grouse were out on the trail with their babies, the smoke in the air was making that hazy pink glow on everything, that is so eerily beautiful. It was an emotionally intense time, maybe two weeks after Lytton burned down, and I felt extremely aware I was living in a small town with one road in and one road out that was surrounded by forest. The municipality dropped off pamphlets on emergency preparedness and how to pack a go-bag in the case of an evacuation. Every time there was a thunderstorm that month, which happens a lot in the Cariboo mountains, I was on edge.

“I think activists should remember you should act from a place of love. A lot of grief and anger is warranted, for sure, for the systems in place that are taking away the things you love. But if you act from anger at those systems, instead of from a place of love for what you want to protect, you’re going to burn out really quickly. I try to remember that.”

Anyways, I went on this hike, and saw some helicopters overhead on the hike, and though very likely they were going to monitor a wildfire in Bowron Lake Provincial Park, I had my mind go down a rabbit hole of the possibility there was a fire at the edge of town. As I hiked out, I was making mental lists of what I would take with me if I had to evacuate, and thinking about what would get left behind. I was mentally letting go of physical objects in my mind, but I was also thinking about the attachment I was feeling to that place, to Wells and to the forest and landscape around it. I mean, everything I saw on the trail would have to be left behind, right?

I guess I realized that day even with the possibility of losing everything I saw that day, like, literally that entire ecosystem could be consumed by a wildfire, that possibility of loss didn’t prevent me from feeling connected to that place, even loved by the trees and plants and mountains around me. I don’t know how to talk about this stuff without it sounding so hokey, but if you’ve felt love for, and loved by the natural world, you know what I’m talking about. I think activists should remember you should act from a place of love. A lot of grief and anger is warranted, for sure, for the systems in place that are taking away the things you love. But if you act from anger at those systems, instead of from a place of love for what you want to protect, you’re going to burn out really quickly. I try to remember that.

Are there any historic examples of artists who brought together landscape painting and activism that you draw inspiration from? What about any other contemporary artist-activists initiating important conversations / bringing awareness to issues (climate-related or otherwise) that you think we should know about?

I taught a class on Art and Climate Change at Kwantlen last year and I had two visiting artists do presentations for my class who make some pretty amazing work.

Kyle Scheurmann is a painter who deals with the climate crisis in his work. Kyle was an artist-in-residence at the Fairy Creek blockades in 2021, and he had an amazing show at Bau-Xi this fall. He calls his paintings a form of “slow journalism”, documenting what is happening to the forests in BC due to industry and climate change. I love borrowing that phrase from him, I think it’s great. His paintings are so detailed, I love the colours, and I admire his ability to paint plein-air.

And the second artist who spoke to my class is Jude Griebel. Jude makes these huge sculptures of plants and animals, recently a lot of his work depicts the non-human world delivering messages to humans. I find his work so touching. I feel like his work animates things we barely consider in our day-to-day life – he gives a dandelion legs and makes it six feet tall; gives a climate protest sign to a human-sized fly; covers an iceberg in eyes. It’s so cool. Jude’s work makes me wish I was a sculptor.

“It’s like, whether or not your house has burned down from a fire, you’ve probably had some sort of metaphorical wildfire in your life. We all have, or are going to at some point.”

From your experience at artist residencies, and just from your regular interactions with various artists and creative communities, what ideas, solutions, etc. do conversations are happening between artists/creatives addressing environmental issues and our relationship with our natural surroundings, and what makes them unique?

Artists are in a privileged position, in that we can bring up questions and conundrums, and we don’t have to pretend we know the solution right away. Art gets to sit with contradictions. I think my work in rural communities has brought a lot of those conundrums to light for me. For example, many small towns across BC sustain themselves economically through resource extraction. Simultaneously, these communities are the most at-risk of burning down. Meanwhile, government decisions about forestry and wildfire policy are being made in Vancouver and Victoria, where really no one’s house is at risk of burning down from a wildfire. I think so much push back in small communities about these policies is so well warranted. Politicians often just come off incredibly naive. For example, when people are reprimanded by government officials for ignoring wildfire evacuation orders, I can see both sides. Wildfire fighters do get put in precarious positions when people don’t evacuate: they can’t drop water or retardant on fires in areas where they know people are; they can’t communicate with people who have stayed behind to fight fires on their property; and if these people want to evacuate at the last minute, they’re putting everyone in dangerous proximity to the fire to get them out. On the other hand, people don’t stay behind to be a pain in the ass to everyone else. They stay behind because they might not have insurance (a lot of insurance companies refuse to insure off-grid properties in BC). If their house burns down, they have nothing. This isn’t irresponsibility for evading insurance, they literally can’t get it. Think about it, would you be okay with evacuating and losing everything you have and having no insurance money to rebuild? I think there needs to be more communication between rural and urban BC to understand these realities in the face of wildfires, that unfortunately I think are only going to get more and more common.

In your opinion, where do artists fit into the larger global conversations happening about environmental stewardship and climate change?

…that’s a very expansive question. If I make work about wildfires in BC, I see that connected to any artist dealing with any topic related to climate change in their work, whether that’s sea level rise, coral reef bleaching, deforestation, heat waves, permafrost melting, you name it. I also see some really basic myths that have propagated a lot of the messes we are in now – the increasingly expanding political divide, class inequality, along with climate change. It’s the myth that we are separate, instead of inextricably linked to everyone and everything around us. That there is an “us” and “them”. With climate change, it’s the myth that we are separate from nature, and that somehow we can control it. I think wildfires are this huge table flip on that myth. No, nature is not controllable. But there are ways to live well with fire, such as the Indigenous cultural burning practices that happened all over the world for millennia before colonizing governments banned the practice to protect profits once the forest became a commodity that could be bought and sold. I love saying wildfires are anti-capitalist – they prove there is no infinite accumulation without consequence. The more fuel that builds in a forest, the more decades you put off a fire that should happen in an ecosystem that is fire adapted, the more you are shooting yourself in the foot in the future. I think there’s an extremely loud message in wildfires, if we can listen.

I think I’m going off topic about how artists fit into all these conversations. I don’t think I make art about fire insurance policies, but in some way what I’ve learned from people living with the reality of wildfire evacuations every summer and what it means in tangible forms to them, probably comes into my practice in some way. It sits in my mind when I’m making paintings or thinking about installation projects. As for the inherent interconnection of everything, I think art can blur that distinction between “us” and “them”. I think good art can even do that between a viewer and a piece of art. I think good art often comes from an extremely personal place, but it is open-ended enough that a viewer can see themselves in it. That’s come through in my wildfire art, for sure. For example, I made some watercolour paintings with sort of retail slogans on them: “Everything Must Go!” and a sign I saw in a store-front window “Something New Coming Soon!” and the text was painted on top of an image of a burning forest. I think when I’ve made a lot of that work, I was like, no one is going to buy these paintings, who would want them? But one person bought the painting with money from a divorce settlement, and the other person was going through stage 3 cancer treatment. It’s like, whether or not your house has burned down from a fire, you’ve probably had some sort of metaphorical wildfire in your life. We all have, or are going to at some point.

Collaboration seems to play an integral role in your artistic practice – from artist residencies specifically designed to bring a group together to explore a predetermined topic / line of questioning, to your ongoing “Fire Season” project with Amory and even after-the-fact (I’m thinking of all of the writing that your friends did about your “Landscapes, Let Go” series). It may seem like an obvious thing, but what are the benefits of collaboration in your opinion? What inspires you to continue to seek out ways to connect with others?

I had a friend help me write a grant a few years ago, and first they just did an informal interview with me about what I was working on. After describing as much as I could about my practice, they said, “It sounds like the conversations you have are the art practice, and the paintings come second.” I had never really considered that, but it feels very true.

When Amory and I started “Fire Season”, for example, it was this really heartening experience. As an artist, often you’re alone in your studio a lot of the time thinking to yourself, “Ok, I care about this thing, but does anyone else care?” “Fire Season” showed me that there were artists and writers from all over the world who were thinking about the same thing as me; who cared alongside me, and were trying to make sense of this seemingly increasingly flammable world we are all living in. I also love seeing the connections that contributors make to each other: seeing people meet in-person at our book launches, or comment on each other’s art on Instagram. The books have made a world-wide community, and that was really unexpected actually.

What are the most unexpected, invaluable relationships have you forged over the years?

My time in rural communities in BC has profoundly changed how I think about environmental issues. Like I outlined above, there are so many conundrums around climate change, resource extraction, politics, and the urban/rural divide in BC. I’m so grateful for the people I’ve met in the Interior and Northern BC, for the foresters and loggers and wildfire fighters and ecologists who took me down FSR’s to look at old burn scars, talk about wildfire recovery with me, explain salvage logging and how tree farm licenses work, forest succession, what plants and animals come back first after a wildfire, and what changes they want to see happen or are making happen in their communities.

What new opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration do you still want to seek out?

I’d honestly love to connect more with academics and scientists in Forestry. I think the thing that prevents that from happening is that scientists are always so busy! Hit me up, you forestry PhD students!

Okay, time for some lighter questions:

What’s your favourite camping spot?

I went to the Chilcotin two summers ago on a road trip with friends, and I think it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen in BC. I actually really love the desert and grassland landscape in BC… and there’s some beautiful spots west of Williams Lake. I went to an artist residency last summer in Dawson City, Yukon, and drove there, and the Cassiar highway was a place in BC I had never seen and was pretty astounded by. Should you be driving up that way, take the detour along the Nisga’a Highway – it is well worth the extra time driving. Stop at the hot springs, “Drowned Forest”, and lava beds, of course.

How about the elusive piece of wilderness that you want to venture to next?

The part of BC that is left to explore for me is the Eastern part of the province. I actually have only been to the Kootenays once! So probably that part of the province deserves a bit more exploration.

Favourite time of year in BC?

I love late Spring in the city… May? When everyone’s gardens look amazing and full of flowers, trees are blooming, everything feels very alive. In the interior of BC, I love September. When the days are still mild, and the light starts getting long and dramatic.

Favourite flora? Fauna?

I love a lot of trees we don’t have here in the city much. Top of my list is Ponderosa Pine, which are everywhere in the interior. If you get close to one in the sun, smell its bark – it smells like vanilla! I also love trembling aspen, which you’ll start seeing when you drive north towards Prince George. Seeing them in the fall when they are turning bright yellow and shimmering in the wind is magical.

As for fauna, I love seeing salmon spawning. There’s an FSR from Squamish you can take all the way down to the very top of Indian Arm; I remember a friend taking me driving there, and we saw schools of pink salmon spawning in the creeks at the top. I had some special camping spots at the end of last summer in Northern BC next to rivers full of spawning salmon. I’m thinking fondly of falling asleep to the sound of them splashing around.

Favourite camping meal and/or thing that tastes best cooked over a campfire?

Tacos are a very easy camping meal. For your first night on a backpacking trip even – just chop some onions, peppers, and tofu in a ziploc bag and cover it in taco seasoning. Bring a little container of salsa and guacamole and a few soft shell tacos. Very impressive on the top of a mountain! I also make a lot of “fancy Mr. Noodles” on camping trips, which is just a package of ramen and then chop some green onions, tofu, and whatever other vegetables are looking sad in your cooler and need to be eaten. Mostly everything tastes better from a campfire. I always pack a cast iron when I’m car camping.

Favourite BC ingredient?

I love foraging mushrooms, and chanterelles are my favorites. It’s really fun to spend a fall afternoon picking in the soggy woods, only to come home to make a meal with things you just found on the forest floor. I say that foraging feels like a treasure hunt for adults.

Favourite way to keep cozy in the winter?

The sauna at Templeton is a go-to spot for a winter activity. Get a bowl of pho after.

Favourite outdoor winter activity?

I try to get into the mountains as much as I can, and I like snowshoeing. I also just bought my first set of cross country skis – I’m hoping they will get a lot of use during my time in Vernon!

Lastly, what’s your favourite memento that you’ve acquired from your various outdoors expeditions over the years? What makes it so special?

I did an artist residency in 2023 on Toronto Island with a group of other artists dealing with the climate crisis in their work. One of the artists was working with locally found clay in her practice, and she had somehow befriended some city workers who were digging these huge tunnels under lake Ontario. There’s a number of city buildings in Toronto where they use Deep Lake Water Cooling Systems –basically they pump cold water from the bottom of the lake into buildings as an air-conditioning system. They were expanding the pipe system at the bottom of the lake, and digging into the lake bed. They got some clay to her, which she showed to the rest of the artists, that would have been underwater for over 10,000 years. She each gave us a piece. I formed it into a little pyramid, it sits on my meditation altar. That’s pretty special.