Critica Magazine: Synergy (cover)

Studio 401.

A Moment with Harmony McNish, 2022.

Liv Cerda

“Artists are key forces in helping people individually

and collectively take responsibility for their own

creativity and human development and, often,

for their connectivity to the rest of the world.”

– Maria Rosario Jackson, BUILDING COMMUNITY: MAKING SPACE FOR ART. Published by The Urban Institute, October 2011.

I met Harmony in our first class of Thesis: Research and have been intrigued by her approach to creating and simply existing ever since. Meeting an individual like Harmony McNish has been invaluable to my personal and academic outlooks on our contrasting industries. She is the type of person to gift you a few of her mother’s homemade lollipops to snack on while you chat about her plans of sourcing Mycelium to be grown into building insulation foam sheets. It is endlessly fascinating to learn about her practice. In A Moment with Harmony McNish, we delve into her points of interest, which will ultimately birth her thesis: Kawatha, craftsmanship, and the modern nomadic movement.

Harmony McNish (she/her) currently works between Barrie and Toronto. McNish primarily bases her practice on her experiences being raised on an intergenerational, traditional homestead in rural Ontario, the Kawartha Lakes region (Kawatha in Anishinaabe). The McNish Homestead is a hundred-acre farm, though she uses the term farm loosely, following the removal of most of the family’s livestock. “There is not much farming going on there, because the land is a part of the alvars. The alvars are a geographic location where prairie-like grass grows, but there is not much soil to work with for farming” says Harmony. The alvars of the McNish Homestead are made up of limestone, making farming almost impossible, thus it has become more of a pasture property. Interestingly, the homestead lies on the boundary road of Eldon, Bexley, and Fenelon townships. This emphasis on localization and the severance of land is a point of interest as she notes that “the idea of boundary and separating land is evident and keeps reappearing in my work. I am interested in the idea of land severances and boundary-making and in turn place-making. How it can be problematic when it collides with the purpose of the land.” 

Surviving a lineage of five generations, the McNish Homestead has experienced severances of its own. Harmony shared with me that she believes she will be the last generation to inhabit their land. “As much as the idea of a traditional homestead is evident in my work I am also still growing, and maturing, and I am not even sure if I am going to be the one that stays on the homestead. There are many complex family issues affecting that decision.” We began discussing her Topography Homestead Quilts (2021). The quilt displays two topographical maps, the left labelled “Brook” and the right “McNish.” In the bottom left, there is a legend that lists the sedimentary rocks that build up the geographical location of her and her fiancee’s homesteads; granite, sand, and limestone. Two parts makeup one landscape, joined with buttons along the inner seam. This one lies close to her heart. 

Harmony has decided to change her last name. This has sparked debate with relatives that claim she will no longer be allowed to stay on the homestead, as she will be a Brook. This pressured extraction of herself from the homestead is reminiscent of Winnipeg-based artist Liz Magor’s creative methodology. Magor’s practice speaks on mortality and local histories through her sculptures using found ephemera. “She creates these little huts, these huts that are distinctly Canadian. Ice huts, Lincoln-log cabins, abstract cabin structures and then situate them into a gallery setting. This reflects exactly what Harmony has planned for her practice, creating little rural experiences to be disseminated throughout urban and gallery settings, experiences that erase you from the landscape and displace your senses. “Displacing these stories through architecture, which is similar to what I have been experiencing in my life. The idea of erasing myself from the family homestead by changing my last name and moving. Moving onward and moving to… new elsewheres.” 

Outside of the survival purposes that the farm equipment and structures Harmony builds service, what conceptual or literal function does rebuilding the structures that she is familiar with have? Harmony aims to narrate the story of her family history. Homestead Out Building: Puffball Dome (2021) is an example of intergenerational knowledge sourcing. Learning and relearning foraging practices that were passed on from her father. She constantly analyzes the role that architecture is in dialogue with boundary-making and how her colonial ancestry plays into her relationship with the land. Influenced by her journey of studying indigenous histories, the Puffball Dome was designed to complement the land through an abstract representation of natural structures, like the Puffball Mushroom, and prototypes made using cuts of raw potato and twigs. The geodesic dome emulates the idea of creating a space to connect with your community and the surrounding landscape, with a small stove in the centre of the structure to nurture these necessary conversations, uninterrupted by the Canadian winter, “there are so many people in the same conversations, in the same breath.”

Woodstove (2020) is a work that Harmony describes as craftsmanship over design, “craftsmanship is approaching your craft with little to no blueprint and building off of intuition and this intergenerational knowledge.” In the winter of 2020, she camped out with the Woodstove for a week, “I slept with my quilt for a little while as well, before I deemed it back as an art piece. I enjoy when my artwork becomes a function with and a part of my life, my livelihood.” American artist Andrea Zittel also blurs this line between art and life, continually reinventing her relationship with her own domestic and social environments. Zittel’s work embodies the notion of escaping, an American version of the story that Harmony is already so familiar with. “The idea of accomplishing the engulfing ‘American Dream,’ to some degree I believe that this dream is a colonial ideology that is unachievable in this day and age. I think Andrea also realizes this in her work.” The link between Zittel’s and McNish’s practice lies in this affinity towards the creation of sustainable and historically contextualized communities. 

Holly Ward, a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist, examines representations of social progress and the utopian imagination. In describing her illustrative sculptural work Here & There (2009), a material and present form that simultaneously functions in the realm of speculation and imagination, she brings our focus to how “the representation of built space carries with it the possibility of speculation on the social systems within [a] space.” I asked Harmony about her thoughts on this - what social systems does she hope to investigate through her work? Is there a specific type of community or discussion that she wants to be going on in these structures or is her sole intention to activate a starting point? Harmony’s response to investigating social systems is actualized through the acknowledgement of systems of protocol. She interrupts this protocol through the intentional avoidance of building permits and the occasional use of ungraded materials, adding to the theme of breaking boundaries and creating a unique character in her builds. “I am derailed. There are protocols I have been ignorant of, I have been ignoring the fact that the government has rules in place to defer us from real ways we can affect our environment. But then I struggle with their hypocrisy in permitting urban sprawl into Ontario’s Greenbelt.”

Harmony is drawn towards the idea of a nomadic homestead, a trending ideology that is especially noticeable on digital platforms such as Youtube with the rise of everyday documentation of YouTubers that subscribe to the “modern nomadic movement,” living out of vans and on-road. She is especially attuned to the idea of picking up pieces of her home, taking familiar motifs and practices that give her a sense of belonging, and installing them elsewhere. “I am inspired by it, don’t get me wrong, and it has even influenced my work a little bit. But when I talk about homesteading, I am referring to the traditional homestead; a place that my family settled to and never left. They never left, and I question, why is that?” Harmony takes from these intertwined histories and showcases her land art utilizing site-specific awareness. There is an attentiveness to tending to severed ends before constructing innocent fresh beginnings. Harmony McNish dissects heavy emotions and challenges us to better understand the connection and the accumulating loss of familiarity.