People

Katherine Lawless is Assistant Professor cross-appointed in the departments of Communication, Media and Film and Geography at the University of Calgary. Working across interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, her research examines human–soil relations as a site of social and ecological transformation.

Within the (Re)mediating Soils project, Katherine leads conceptual and field research design, coordinates artist residencies and exhibitions, and brings together researchers, artists, and community partners to explore soil as a relational medium across ecological, cultural, and institutional contexts. She has secured competitive research funding and Soil Champions Committee sponsorship.

David Janzen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. His research engages environmental humanities, media studies, and critical theory, with a focus on human–environment relations and arts-based approaches to research. His work also includes sound studies, poetry, and digital media.

David leads the research-creation stream of the (Re)mediating Soils project. He also contributes to fieldwork, data analysis, and dissemination, and is developing sound-based approaches to studying and interpreting soils.

Ed Gregorich is a soil scientist and Honorary Research Associate with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. His work focuses on characterizing the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils to evaluate their health and productivity. He has experience across agricultural and forest ecosystems.

Ed conducts laboratory analyses and evaluates the results for the (Re)mediating Soils project, studying soils collected from research sites in Southern Ontario, Alberta, and Yukon. He has also collected soil monoliths from cultivated and adjacent forest areas; presented findings at scientific conferences, workshops, and farmer meetings; and contributed to related scientific publications.

Josephine Mills is Director/Curator of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and Professor of Museum Studies in the university's Department of Art. Her research, often developed through projects connected to gallery exhibitions and programs, focuses on socially engaged art, curatorial practice, and public engagement in gallery contexts. She is a collaborator on Mootookakio’ssin (distant awareness), a project that connects people living on traditional Blackfoot territory (Treaty 7) with historical Blackfoot items held in European museum collections.

Josephine contributes to the (Re)mediating Soils project through exhibition curation, outreach, and the organization of artist residencies.

Henry Janzen is a soil biochemist and Honorary Research Associate with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge, Alberta. He examines the cycling of carbon, energy, and nutrients in agricultural systems, looking for ways to sustain the ecological and social functions of soils in the face of global stresses. A hypothesis underlying his work is that soils serve as ecosystem memories, perhaps offering clues for living more harmoniously on land.

Henry advises the (Re)mediating Soils project on soil measurements, contributes to the design and implementation of field investigations, supports the development of research outputs, and presents findings in academic and public venues.

Mary Reid is Director and Chief Curator of the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario, and former Director/Curator of the Woodstock Art Gallery in Woodstock, Ontario.

One of (Re)mediating Soils’ earliest collaborators, Mary championed the project in Woodstock and added it the gallery’s exhibition schedule. She helped secured project sponsorship from the Soil Champions Committee (under the umbrella of the Soil Conservation Council of Canada) and made connections with Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show and other partners. She will assist with management of the Expanded Horizons exhibition at McMaster in 2027, liaising with faculty and students on ancillary programming to support project goals.

Api’soomaahka is a Blackfoot Elder, artist, and illustrator, and the operator of Naapi's Garden on Kainai Nation territory. His work is deeply rooted in the Blackfoot worldview and uses painting to teach.

Api’soomaahka took part in two (Re)mediating Soils’ artist residencies in 2025. In Alberta, he led garden tours, seed-cleaning workshops, and other public-engagement events and collaborated on Future Prairie (Remediation Plot), a land-based artwork with Alana Bartol, Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed, and Kara Matthews. In Yukon, he remediated a small section of land with native plants. From these experiences, he created Sapiipommaa (planting the seed), a mixed-media artwork of seeds and soil.

Alana Bartol is an interdisciplinary artist and Assistant Professor at Alberta University of Arts in Calgary, Alberta (Mohkinstsis). Their practice examines resource extraction, more-than-human relationality, and concepts of remediation through experimental video, drawing, installation, performance, and socially engaged art.

Alana participated in (Re)mediating Soils’ Alberta artist residency in 2025, leading public-engagement events and contributing to the research-creation component of Future Prairie (Remediation Plot), a land-based collaborative artwork with Api’soomaahka, Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed, and Kara Matthews. Their video piece Prairie Break appeared in the Field Notes exhibition in 2026.

Hannah Berger is a Montreal-based visual artist and fiction writer who works in a variety of media. Her work is strung with common threads of history and the excavation of language, often employing historical and experimental methods of making and storytelling.

Hannah’s involvement in (Re)mediating Soils began with her participation in the Alberta artist residency in 2025. During the residency, she gathered wood carbonized through wildfires (natural charcoal) from the land around the Coutts Centre for Western Canadian Heritage to use in a series of three drawings on paper. These works, Map I, Map II, and Map III, explore cycles of death and the material consequences of ecological destruction.

Beany Dootjes is a Lethbridge-based artist and gardener whose work includes drawing, painting, mixed media, and installation. Her practice focuses primarily on gender roles, food issues, and historical and contemporary urban soils and gardens.

Beany was present during the (Re)mediating Soils artist residency in 2025 and offered lessons in watercolours during public-engagement events. For the Field Notes exhibition at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery in 2026, she created two studies of native plants with graphite and coloured pencil—Plant Studies and Wild Strawberry Studies—as well as Preserving the Harvest (with Recipe Booklet), a selection of glass jars of preserves from her garden.

Mailey Horner is an artist and MFA candidate at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (Kjipuktuk). In her practice, she explores how art is materially bound to modes of production and extraction, and how it can resist capitalism and forms of enclosure through methodologies of decay, collaboration, and communal practice.

Mailey participated in the (Re)mediating Soils Alberta artist residency in 2025. The two works that emerged from this residency—What ochre knows of electricity (erratic vessels for errant data) and Lithify—are driven by found materials and incorporate elements of sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, and assemblage.

RL Martens is a conceptual artist based in Philadelphia (Lenapehoking). They are interested in earthen materials like clay and soil, their unique properties, and the stories they hold. They incorporate these materials into ceramic artworks, research, and writing, which often begin with the question, “What if the soil could speak?”

RL participated in the (Re)mediating Soils Alberta artist residency in 2025, producing a cyanotype work on glass, (soil does not speak English but has names for these and all other things). They are currently working with fellow artists Hannah Berger and Mailey Horner on a collaborative scent-based project conceived during the residency.

Kara Matthews is a horticulturist and land steward at the Coutts Centre for Western Canadian Heritage near Nanton, Alberta, where she maintains over 20 perennial and annual gardens, including native grassplots started in the 1990s by Jim Coutts and his dedicated gardening team.

With Alana Bartol, Api’soomaahka, and Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed, Kara is a collaborator on Future Prairie (Remediation Plot), a land-based artwork at the Coutts Centre. This collaboration has allowed her to apply her knowledge of environmental reclamation and the experience gained from attentively observing the landscape with an empathetic approach to all living components and structures.

Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed is an artist, botanist, herbalist, educator, and co-owner of ALCLA Native Plants in Carstairs, Alberta, where she grows and stewards prairie species. She has gained familiarity and practical experience with many ethnobotanical uses of native plants.

Latifa was present during (Re)mediating Soils’ Alberta art residency in 2025, leading public-engagement events such as garden tours and seed-cleaning workshops and sharing her knowledge of indigenous plants. As a collaborator on Future Prairie (Remediation Plot)—a land-based artwork with Alana Bartol, Api’soomaahka, and Kara Matthews—she provided the project’s native plants, grown from sustainably collected wild seed.

Ed Pien is a contemporary artist based in Toronto, Ontario. His work, which spans drawing, large-scale installations, printmaking, papercutting, video, and photography, explores the interconnection of human and more-than-human worlds.

Ed participated in (Re)mediating Soils’ Yukon artist residency in 2025, engaging soil as a sentient and dynamic collaborator in three artworks: What is Soil, a participatory project inviting reflection on human–soil relations; Sounding Earth, a sound-based video and an alarm for our environmental crisis; and To Be Soil (in collaboration with Ed Gregorich and John Lenart), a buried sculptural intervention that merges scientific observation with artistic inquiry.

Karin van Dam is an artist in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her work, which emphasizes interconnection and the depth of time, treats soil as a living archive where history is preserved, layer upon layer, housing treasures of invisible wonders.

Through the (Re)mediating Soils Yukon artist residency in 2025, Karin created five artworks that explore soil and its relationships: Field Notes, a mixed-media diary of her experiences; Pores and Channels, a graphite work on paper; Symbioses, a mixed-media installation; Earthworm hole and its surrounding midden, made of lasered felt; and Colonies of Bacteria (growing in soil), a graphite work on paper. (All works include text by Ed Gregorich.)

Michelle Wilson is a queer, neurodivergent artist, mother, and educator at the University of Guelph whose work centres on community-based programs that integrate creative arts with health and wellness. Her practice foregrounds artistic collaboration as a form of anticolonial care and challenges individualistic conceptions of the artist.

Michelle funded the first round of (Re)mediating Soils’ research creation in 2022 and created an installation-based artwork with the New Moon Community Homestead in 2024. She also participated in (Re)mediating Soils’ Yukon artist residency in 2025, creating universes upon universes, a work of plant-dyed embroidered cotton; and 65 days, a time-lapse video.

Christa Avram is a graduate student in the psychology department of the University of Lethbridge. Her work investigates cognition and the creative process from the perspective of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology.

Within the (Re)mediating Soils project, Christa is a research assistant to Katherine Lawless. She collaborates with the University of Calgary research team on qualitative analysis of project data and provides editorial support to Katherine Lawless, David Janzen, and Sheri Nault in the production of the “(Re)mediating Soils” special issue of PUBLIC (available May 2026).

Lidija Sijacic is a graphic and web designer and artist who lives and creates on Blackfoot land. Her academic research focuses on discursive design artefacts in opposition to neoliberal practices in digital health and well-being technology.

Lidija developed the (Re)mediating Soils visual identity and website. She also works on a variety of other digital and print projects, including user experience and interface design, exhibition graphics, and instructional design.

Akon Arok is a Fall 2025 graduate of the University of Calgary, where she studied Communication and Media with an embedded certificate in Mental Wellbeing and Resilience. She is passionate about the intersection of communication and technology and hopes to pursue a public sector role that brings together both of these interests.

Within (Re)mediating Soils, Akon serves as Research Assistant to Katherine Lawless, managing the project’s social media platforms and translating research and project-related information into accessible language for audiences of diverse backgrounds.