CANOLA FIELDS FOREVER

This is a proposal for Beakerhead 2017.  It was in response to a call for projects based on Canadian innovation.

If you’ve driven through the Canadian prairies in summertime, you’ve probably seen patches of the most vibrant, saturated yellow you’ve ever laid eyes on dotting the landscape. These parcels of pure joy are fields of canola, a Canadian agricultural innovation of the 1970s. Bred from rapeseed by researchers at the University of Manitoba, canola was engineered as a resilient plant whose seeds produce a healthy vegetable oil consumed the world over. Fortuitously, canola also produces fields of tiny yellow flowers that give a feast for the eyes as well as the mouth.

This project is inspired by rolling fields of canola and offers a playful total immersion in a constantly changing landscape of colour. A bright yellow fabric floats on streams of air supplied by a grid of upward blowing fans placed underneath an elevated platform with a perforated surface. The fabric is weighted down in some places by soft “seed” cushions, and in other places, the fabric has openings that act as pass-throughs and windows to the sky. People are invited to wander, play, explore, and relax under, over, and on the bright billowing fabric.

Underneath the fabric, visitors are immersed in a constantly shifting yellow cave-like environment, which is shaped by air currents, the soft “seed” cushions, and the movement of people on top of the fabric. By pulling down the fabric and passing through one of the openings, visitors can step onto the fabric, where the sky opens up above, but the fabric gives a sense of immediate enclosure and disorientation. Wandering on the fabric, people may encounter each other and carve out larger spaces, or they may come across the soft “seed” cushions and decide to rest and take it all in. The possibilities for open play are endless. Finally, visitors may climb into the “lookout” and observe the installation from above to fully appreciate the dance of the fabric, evoking wind rippling across a prairie field.