Oliver Kellhammer

I am interested in exploring the processes of ecological regeneration in the wake of human disturbance, either through passive field observation (what can I not do?) of biota recolonizing industrial wastelands or by actively engaging in the biological and socio-political processes that inform these landscapes by attempting to improve their relationships with each other. The latter approach often takes the form of what I call 'botanical interventions', whereby I employ horticultural techniques to mitigate problems between people and the landscape, enhancing both the sense of the place and its ecological carrying capacity, as well as addressing such problems as erosion, the availability of affordable and nutritious food and the frequent lack of agency low-income communities are allowed over the design of their urban spaces.

My past projects include a community access bio-materials plantation, the reforestation of an eroded railway ravine where the vegetation is now protected as intellectual property, and working with squatters in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood to establish the country’s first public permaculture food forest and Asian ethnobotanical arboretum.

My most recent investigations have focused on the speculative botany of climate change and the role of brownfield ecologies as refugia for biodiversity. My interventions, when I make them, are deliberately anti-monumental. As they integrate into the ecological and cultural communities that form around them, my role as the artist becomes increasingly obscured.