Fold
Fold is an outdoor installation consisting of thirteen steel rings of varying diameters (40–150cm), each with a sheet of handmade paper stretched within it, installed upright, adjacent to rare Charitable Reserve’s Grand Allee trail that runs through the Ancient Woods. The trail is located within the Haldimand Tract, the territory of the Onkwehon:we Peoples of the Six Nations of the Grand River. It is also territory of the Anishinaabe Peoples Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
Arranged along a single sightline, the rings decrease and increase in scale modeled after the shape of a hypothetical wormhole; a tunnel through spacetime. The paper is cast from invasive phragmites stalks harvested in September 2025 from rare Charitable Reserve. Mixed with pure abaca fibres, the membranes are intended to degrade through exposure to weather, worms, and other soil organisms over the duration of the installation until the rings are empty. When reinstalled in a new location, with paper remade from whatever invasive or locally abundant plant material is available there, the spacetime travel is continued.
Fold is “completed” by its own degradation which is not an ending but a continuation. A time-lapse camera capturing the rings and the surrounding forest environment every 30 minutes acts as a record of that degradation.
The piece was made in coordination with rare’s Conservation Scientist and with support from the Ages Foundation Fellowship & Bursaries program.