As it Once Was

Commissioned by Alliance Partners, this monumental public artwork at Vanguard Strata in Richmond, British Columbia, pays tribute to the region's native bog forests. Developed between 2020 and 2024, the installation encompasses architectural glazing across the four-storey façades of two commercial buildings and two large-scale photographic murals integrated into the enclosure gates.

Inspired by the neighbouring Richmond Nature Park, the glazing depicts native trees photographed and subsequently hand-drawn into vectorized compositions. Spanning 108 windows across the two buildings, the artwork reflects the changing seasons, with autumn and winter represented on Building A and spring and summer on Building B. The compositions correspond to the vertical strata of the forest, connecting the height of the architecture to the ecological structure of the surrounding landscape.

Beyond their visual presence, the graphics function as bird-strike deterrents and interact with natural sunlight, casting shifting silhouettes of the forest throughout the buildings' interiors. These moving shadows recreate the experience of light filtering through a woodland canopy.

The accompanying gate murals comprise intricate photographic collages developed from more than 200 handmade cyanotypes. Working in consultation with a biologist from Richmond Nature Park, I collected, pressed, and preserved local plant specimens before producing individual cyanotype impressions. Approximately 150 were digitized and layered into compositions that reveal the intricate forms, textures, and translucency of the region's flora.

Together, the glazing and murals reconnect the industrialized site with its ecological history, bringing representations of the native landscape into the built environment through photography, drawing, light, and architectural integration.