About

Angie Arsenault is an artist and researcher from a working class background whose practice harnesses acts of deep noticing and a sensual engagement with the natural world. Growing up immediately next to a notorious toxic waste site, in Sydney on the deindustrializing island of Unama'ki /Cape Breton, had a deep impact on Angie. Her work engages with concepts of value, ruination, trauma, memory, botanical life, detritus, storytelling, and the art of survival in late stage capitalism through social practice, interventions in the field and installation predominantly. She holds both a BFA (2004) and MFA (2017) from NSCAD University.

Artist Statement

Through my conceptually based installation practice I aim to ask questions such as how do people live in and with ruination? I mean this as a basic question of survival as well as a philosophical question. I ask this question while simultaneously using the concept of "Imperial Debris" (Ann Laura Stoler, 2013) as a lens to view ruination while thinking through the vegetal and other non human actors in our everyday lifeworlds. The works that I have produced over the past eight years have dealt with concepts of labour, value, survival, resilience, resourcefulness and encouraging/nourishing a sensual engagement with the natural world. My exploration of these themes harnesses knowledge that would have been considered quite basic in the past, but is now relegated to the fringes, or specialized knowledge: foraging for food, medicine and pigments, canning and preserving food, harvesting salt from sea water, etc. I also disseminate the knowledge in varying ways including through the artwork itself, as in the Little library of foraged inks, or Making salt, which I would consider to be poetically didactic. Further to this, I wish to encourage people to deeply consider what it is that we actually need to survive/thrive and to empower people to learn skills that will bring them into a closer commune with the earth that sustains us. My work is a meditation on the precarity of living in a time of late capitalism that also asks the question: What does it take to survive/thrive in late capitalist ruins?

Angie Arsenault

I would like to gratefully acknowledge that I am currently being hosted in Unama’ki, Land of Fog, the unceded ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq people since time immemorial.