I have been interested in the work of Liz Toohey-Wiese for several years, and first met her when I included her work in the group exhibition that I curated at CSA space in 2022, titled Jelena and the Internet Celebrity Cat. In addition to her commitment to art that addresses climate change,  alongside artistic collaborator Amory Abbott, she edited the self-published, three volume series of books called Fire Season, which gather a diverse community to use visual art, poetry, writing, and essays to look at wildfires as a container for more complex and experiential topics like grief, climate change, loss, new growth, and the changing ideas of landscape.¹ After taking in their project, I wanted to know more about how Liz thinks about her painting practice in relation to environmental activism, and changing the public’s perception on climate change. Her exhibition of paintings at Duplex in December of last year was the perfect opportunity. 

Having also recently embarked on my own series of landscapes in the studio, I wanted to know Liz’s perspective on how, as settler artists, we can responsibly depict the local landscape to challenge the settler-ideology of the hierarchy between humans and nature which contributes to climate inaction. The interview took place on January 2, 2025 at Duplex Artist Society in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations 

***

Dan Starling: Liz, I want to preface this conversation by telling you why I wanted to talk to you about the work in your show Landscapes, Let Go. I’m doing this project on reimagining these prints by Walter J. Phillips (1884-1963), who was a Canadian printmaker in the 20th century. I don’t know if you know his work that well, because his practice is not that well known I don’t think.

Liz Toohey-Wiese: Is that the gallery at Banff?

DS: Yes. The gallery at Banff is named after him because he taught there. He taught groups of students in plein air landscape painting and sketching. He would take his classes out and they would set up their easels and paint and sketch from nature. The reason I think that he’s not well known in the history of art is that he just did woodblock prints and watercolour painting. He didn’t paint in oil. Therefore, you know, he was never considered on that same scale as the oil painters. My interest in him is more to do with printmaking, and because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot about trying to find my own approach to creating landscapes. As such, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the subject of settlers and landscape painting in this contemporary moment.

LTW: Cool. I’m just going to look up his prints briefly. [Searches on phone.]

DS: For example, this is one of his prints of Banff, titled Mount Rundle (1950). It’s a watercolour woodcut print. His works are quite beautiful, they’re kind of like the iconic images of the Canadian wilderness landscape. Interestingly, most of his prints are quite small scale, like 10 x 8 cms.

LTW: Wow.

DS: I guess I’m interested in them because they seem deliberately anti-modern, in the way that ignores abstraction, and I want to re-image the landscape today using a different starting point than the well-known trajectory from art history. At this time when Phillips was working, between the 1930s – ‘50s, it’s like the beginning of abstract painting after settler painters like Emily Carr and the Group of Seven have been experimenting with a different way of portraying nature. I’ve been recently reading Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting by Paul Galvez. One of the arguments in the book is that abstract painting begins with the landscape, and that the Impressionists, Cezanne for example, used landscape as the subject to create a non-illusionistic space. The picture plane in such work is flattened, and the intense blocks of colour don’t allow the viewer to enter into a three-dimensional space.

In Galvez’s text, he notes that Courbet’s style of landscape painting, in particular, is considered irrelevant to the canon as it was being made, in that he mainly made them just to sell.² Wanting to be commercially successful, some of them portray scenes where a deer drinks water from a stream––very kitsch. But then there are also these ones that are very flat. For example, The Source of the Loue (1864), or some ocean landscapes that depict just a wave––The Wave (1869) is an example. In each painting there’s no sense of three-dimensional space. But they begin this trajectory where humans are shut out of the landscape and, in some way, cut off from nature. According to this history, humans are not a part of nature but are distinct, which is what I want to question. 

LTW: That’s some nice background for our conversation.

DS: These are the precedents for my project and this new re-evaluation of this localized history of the landscape. So, I’m wondering if that is something that you’re interested in, and what are your artistic precedents? What would be your influences in terms of the type of work that you’re doing? Further to that, how do you see the images that you’re working with contributing to that critical awareness of the environment?

LTW: When I went to do my master’s degree at NSCAD, my proposal was something like, I’m going to do a coast-to-coast comparison. I already painted BC, but in moving to Nova Scotia, I wanted to paint the Atlantic coast and find similarities, differences, whatever. And so I drove across Canada to go to Nova Scotia, and I took a bunch of pictures along the way. And in the first semester of my grad program, I painted a lot from the photos I took on my road trip. And my advisor at the time was like, “These paintings suck.” And I was like, “I know… I don’t know why, but they suck. I feel nothing when I look at them.” I realized how unattached I was to the places I had been and to Nova Scotia in general. I just couldn’t connect with the landscape there. I thought to myself: This coast is weird. All the trees are tiny. The Atlantic Ocean is so angry. I don’t get it. And so, I just basically threw out my entire first semester of paintings.

When I first moved, I was incredibly homesick. I had a really hard time getting used to the weather and I just didn’t feel connected there. I think it took a couple months for me to decide that if I’m going to be homesick, then I’ll just make paintings about being homesick. So I had to figure out what it would mean to fully lean into homesickness and ask myself what was I going to do with that feeling? At the time, my self-consciousness around that feeling led to questioning my position as a settler while feeling attached to place. That felt very hard to grapple with, or I didn’t know how to talk about it at the time––but I don’t feel that anymore.

Now, I believe that wherever one feels attachment to a place is real. And I feel an attachment to the west coast of BC, but I’ve also felt it in the interior of BC. There is something very deep about how I feel here that I can’t deny. Perhaps it’s lived experience, but I’m 100% sure I’m never going to live anywhere except BC for the rest of my life. It’s not so much to do with the city I currently live in, Vancouver, but it’s more to do with the trees and the light and the way that I understand the weather. When I get up in the morning, I can tell if it’s going to rain or not by what the clouds look like. I remember that in Nova Scotia, I couldn’t read the weather, and I’d be wearing the wrong clothes all the time. In that moment, I decided that I was just going to make paintings about this. 

I stopped using photographic reference in my paintings during this time because I wanted to lean into what happens when you try to paint a memory of a place. In this exhibition, I’ve re-introduced photographic references as starting points for paintings. There’s something about the specificity that feels more important now.

Another thing that has been influential to my paintings is narrative. An example of such a reference point for me would be the composition style of Renaissance landscape paintings. At that time, landscapes were places in which to enact religious narratives. There’s this manipulation of the space to allow for narrative to be foregrounded that has really influenced me. It’s like a flipped-up world with paths that get your eye to go around the picture. For instance, Jesus is here and here and here and here, and here, he’s like healing some people, and here he’s meeting a beggar, but over here he’s confronting a wild animal. The interesting thing is that everyone is the same size because it’s just about showing what’s going on. It’s more about storytelling than showing a realistic landscape––there’s something about storytelling that’s important in these paintings.

I wrote a lot in my thesis about my work in relation to Canadian landscape painting, specifically looking at the Group of Seven. What was different about my work was the presence of humans. People are either present in my paintings or there’s evidence that humans were there to undo a colonial narrative of terra nullius. It’s also just my experience of a landscape with other people. It’s important to me that the figures are all specific people in my life, but this is not inherently necessary for the viewer. The figure is a way for you to insert yourself into the landscape, or to understand scale. 

Additionally, ambiguity fuels the narrative. Objects are abstracted in the sense that it doesn’t matter if the viewer knows it’s actually a mattress that we carried out to the tent when we went camping. It’s also fine if they think it’s a rain jacket. Who cares? I think what happened in those original paintings that I made during my MFA, with the looseness and the abstraction, allowed people to be like, oh, that reminds me of New Zealand. Or, that looks like this place in Ontario I go to. The abstraction now happens through colour and perspective. You can tell I’m not painting something as I saw it, that there’s something constructed about it. 

In terms of feeling the need to comment on climate change, a lot of the feedback I’ve had about the show was that there was no imagery of forest fires. In response, I usually mention that I was in Northern BC and there’s lots of water. Moths, Boya Lake (2024) has maybe the most direct references to climate change because at the top there’s a burnt landscape. A wildfire has come through that forest and it’s kind of patchy. And then these little marks are moths, it’s a spruce budworm infestation, which is a pest in Northern BC. I think my wildfire work is separate from my landscape work in this weird way. The wildfire work in my mind feels in one clump, whereas landscape painting feels like it’s in another clump. But then it feels connected in other ways.

In relation to climate change, Hannah Tollefson’s exhibition essay on the exhibition, called “The Fuel of History”³ speaks to this intense feeling of attachment to a place that is temporary and transient; the kind you know is going to last for a night. When you’re on a road trip, you stop to set up your tent, like making a little home for the night, then wake up in the morning, make some coffee, and pack up and leave. Spending twelve hours in these places was an intense enough experience in my mind that I wanted to make paintings about them. A road trip is like a way to practice letting go of “landscape,” which is this thing we’re going to be asked to do with the climate crisis. To let go of those places as we have come to know them. Things are going to change. Is it going to be a wildfire? Is it going to be a flood? Is it going to be a mine that opens up? Is it going to be logging that’s going to cut down a forest? These changes are happening. My friend who is in forestry told me it’s projected that by 2050 Western Red Cedars won’t be able to survive in Coastal BC because of how hot and dry our summers are now. I think what I’m interested in right now with my work, and thinking around climate change, is the acceptance of climate change. 

Acceptance is not resignation. Acceptance of loss or change I think is a good place to work from. If you’re calm and not super emotional and angry and depressed, that is a good place to come from. This work is about climate change in that it’s about love. These paintings are about love. I really love these places and that must come through in the way I paint them. They’re pretty landscape paintings. It might sound hokey, but I think we should operate from a place of love. Activism is ineffective unless you come from a place of love. It’s not good to come from a place of being angry. You can be angry. Of course, you’re angry because you’re losing something you love and people are profiting off of the places we love and destroying them. Of course, we’re angry about it, but you have to root down into the fact that the first basic thing is that you love that place. I don’t know how to not get really, like, spiritual about it, but it’s fine. It’s art. It’s spiritual.

DS: That’s a great answer. Now I see what you’re saying, in particular, about what’s different about these paintings as opposed to your earlier ones. I’m thinking of the earlier postcard series that is a painting of a wildfire with text on it, for example, Miss You Already! (2019) which feels more like it’s symbolizing activism or it’s inciting more of a reaction. That is maybe a reaction of anger. 

LTW: I think in those works, with the text, I’m trying to really root into dark humour. There’s something in them where I feel like everything sucks. But I definitely think that they evoke more sadness or anger.

DS: So, these paintings are more about personalizing it and telling a story that’s a narrative based on your experience and then allowing people to relate it to their own experience of camping, or road tripping, or those kinds of activities which would be different from historical precedents of universalizing the landscape as an experience, maybe in defining that anybody can experience this view of the wilderness. That’s interesting, and it’s a lot of what I wanted to talk to you about. In relation to your work on Fire Season, the depiction of wildfires is about distance and experience. The depiction of the flames is a big part of how we portray climate change. But once the smoke gets into the air, even if you’re not right in the vicinity of the fire, we know that we still experience the fire thousands of kilometers away from where it is actually happening due to the air pollution. 

A book that I read recently, called Terror from The Air by Peter Sloterdijk, describes how the real birth of modernism was the moment of gas chemical warfare in the First World War because it changed the consciousness of battle. It’s no longer like the enemy is directly in front of you. It surrounds you.⁴ It’s something you literally cannot escape because the air is terrorized. It’s like you’re totally immersed in the warfare. It’s all around you. It’s not this other army or their proximity that is the threat, it’s the environment. Then he talks about artworks made in relation to air, like Duchamp’s 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), a glass vial of Parisian air that he brought over to New York, or Salvador Dali’s performance wearing a scuba suit. The whole point of that deep sea diving suit is that it’s about the environment you’re in, what Sloterdijk calls a new era of “atmospheric consciousness.”⁵

LTW: It’s terrifying because you’re vulnerable in a way in which you never have been before. It makes me think of that piece by Santiago Sierra, Four Black Vehicles with the Engine Running inside an Art Gallery (2008) where he just runs cars in the gallery 24/7 but pipes the exhaust outside.

DS: That’s another great example. It’s about this kind of alien environment. The environment becomes this place of fear instead of a place of peace. So, the question that I want to ask you is, what is the role of art in changing people’s minds about climate change? 

I found this article recently on CBC News and the headline was something like “Edward Burtynsky’s photos are stunning, but do they move people to take environmental action?”⁶ Burtynsky made the movie Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and this other series called the Anthropocene Project. His photos are very beautiful but the idea is that his art is supposed to enable a change in consciousness. To change people’s behaviours so that they take climate change more seriously. And that’s obviously part of Burtynsky’s project, is that he wants to do that. But this article suggests that he’s failing to do that. But my question is, how can it possibly be that he’s failing? 

One of my thoughts about it is that by taking up this idea of the Anthropocene and that humans are distinct from nature creates this kind of separation. Whereas with something like new materialisms, there are these ideas about how we’re not that much different from nature. It’s a new reaction to the Anthropocene, to say no, we shouldn’t look at things that way because it actually distances us even more from nature. I believe that we should come up with a new philosophy about how we are a part of nature and that nature itself is also an active participant. It’s not like we are the actors and nature is passive, it too has agency. This also aligns with Indigenous philosophies about the agency of nature.

This brings me back to this quote that I wanted to share with you from Courbet’s Landscapes, the moment in which the author suggests that the landscape itself becomes a substance that is paint like:

The pictured image (landscape) and the material used to picture it (paint) become co-substantial… painting, briefly, offers itself at one and the same time as illusion and matter…wet sand oozes as if emulsified, sea foam coagulates into a think paster, rocks develop a moist skin…the world depicted is itself paint-like.⁷

This is the disillusion of three-dimensional space I was talking about earlier. Where you can’t locate yourself in the landscape and that reality itself is much more fluid. The author is very big on these landscapes where Courbet uses a palette knife. Which is the most horrible type of painting, right? But as a painter, what do you think of this concept? You were talking about spirituality and a larger or deeper connection. So, what do you think about this in relation to painting as a vehicle to achieve action on climate change?

LTW: What I would say about that is also touched on in my thesis, where I was comparing the Group of Seven studies with their bigger studio works. I was basically suggesting that their studies are better than their finished works, because if landscape painting is meant to represent the experience or the feeling of being in the place, then every step you take away from it is going to make the painting fail more and more. So plein air doesn’t even get it, but it’s probably the closest thing to getting it. For example, look at a little Tom Thompson painting of a snowy landscape where the horizon line is just one brush stroke. You can almost imagine his fingers getting cold and him being like, “I gotta go, it’s done.” In paintings like this, there’s something where I feel it more––I feel it more impactfully when I see the studies.     

Landscape painting is always a failure. It always fails. It’s never going to capture what it feels like to be there. In a way, I think about my own landscape paintings as accepting and embracing failure. I can’t convey what it felt like to be there. So, I give up. I’m going to make perspectives that don’t make sense. I’m going to use colours that weren’t there. All landscape art fails. I think it’s something about paint. I had a professor in my grad studies who said, “Painting is just pushing mud around.” And that’s all it is, right? There is something very organic about it. It’s about the process that you go though, working on a painting for a month. Changing this, changing that, going back and forth, changing the colour, changing the scale. 

With these three paintings––Fever Island (Exstew Falls); Moths, Boya Lake; Waterfalls, Northern BC––I feel such intense nostalgia. Especially at the end of summer where I’m often sort of traveling more nomadically across rural BC. I often come back to work in September and suffer a great deal. And I feel like I hate Vancouver. I hate staying in one spot, fuck the city. I hate it here. And so I just felt, what if these paintings were like an offering to these landscapes and these experiences I had, and asking if they would just let go of me? I feel gripped by these places and I feel like if I make a painting of them that would remove the little hooks out of me and let me move on, because I obviously live here in the city. I have a life here. I have to keep going. I think about these pieces as offerings to a place, and the memories, and the attachments that I feel towards them. 

I’ve been going to a Zen Buddhist Centre for the last year and a half, and I’m finding Buddhist philosophy very useful to think about the climate crisis as well as in dealing with my own ecological grief. In the fall, we go into a practice period which is about 8 to 10 weeks and it coincides with the rainy season in Japan. This practice allows me to get a little bit more serious about my practice. I’m reading books in a very studious way for those months. This year we were reading a text called the “Flower Garland Sutra” which is this insane 1,500 page text.

There’s a very important image from this text. The image is called Indra’s net. Indra is a Hindu deity. It’s the image of a net, and at every cross point there’s a jewel and each jewel reflects all the other jewels in the net. It’s infinite. There’s no end to it. We’ve been using that image of Indra’s net to talk about a lot of different things. The main idea is interdependence, that everything affects everything else. We’ve also looked at it through an ecological lens.

In talking about issues around social justice, the climate crisis, the rise of fascism and political segregation, and these sorts of struggles, I feel like the main problem is separation. Feeling  isolated is the main problem. That’s where we fucked up. We think of ourselves as isolated from one another, as if we can make decisions as a country on what we want to do with our carbon emissions, as if it won’t affect literally every other country. Doesn’t the atmosphere prove us wrong? It’s all connected, there is no such thing as separate carbon emissions. I think that’s the first step in dealing with the climate crisis. We have to feel like everybody is connected. Like if we keep doing this in this way in the West, then Bangladesh is going to be underwater. And that’s the unfairness of it too, that so-called “First World” countries are going to cause these Third World countries at sea levels to suffer greatly or disappear. It’s deeply unfair. In this way, the first step would be to see that interdependence. Similarly, I think that this idea that art should change everyone’s mind is putting too much pressure on it really, because I think what people need to have is really clear, first-hand experiences. 

Every time I take my students on a field trip, it feels like a radical act, and I think that if I could just radicalize them like 1% more that would make a difference. I did a field trip with my students with the Cougar Creek streamkeepers. In Surrey there’s a little creek close to the University that I work at called Cougar Creek which flows into the Fraser River––and it’s full of trash! There’s so much trash in it. So, when I take my students there, we get those garbage grabbers and we’ll pick things up while we go on a guided walk with one of the streamkeepers. The streamkeepers do many public volunteer activities like garbage pickups and building structures to improve salmon habitats so that the salmon can come up to spawn. Over Christmas they found salmon spawning up past Scott Road for the first time ever. They saw seven Coho salmon there! I think the way to do it is to do something small. If everybody just did small things close to where they lived, it could get better slowly.

DS: Okay, last question, it’s a fun one. Did you watch this British TV show called Landscape Artist of the Year? It’s a painting competition where they have eight people with roughly the same view set up and they have to make a painting in four hours. I wonder what you would think of the show? 

LTW:  No. I haven’t seen it. 

DS: Really?

LTW: Like I said, I don’t do plein air at all.

1. https://www.whistlerlibrary.ca/event/fire-season-collective-sense-making-around-wildfires/
2. Paul Galvez, Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 7.
3. Hannah Tollefson, “The Fuel of History,” exhibition text for Landscapes, Let Go by Liz Toohey-Wiese at Duplex Artist Society, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a7a89cbd55b41c837b9bf1f/t/67fe5f87e51bd3617004310a/1744723848081/The+Fuel+of+History+by+Hannah+Tollefson.pdf.
4. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 9.
5. Ibid.
6. Lauren Sproule, “Edward Burtynsky’s photos are stunning — but do they move people to take environmental action?” CBC News, March 16, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/edward-burtynsky-exhibition-environment-action-1.7141168.
7. Paul Galvez, Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 11. Thank you to Jaleh Mansoor for suggesting this text.

Landscapes, Let Go by Liz Toohey-Wiese ran from December 12, 2024 – January 2, 2025 at Duplex Arts Society in Vancouver, BC.

Feature Image: Moths, Boya Lake, 2024 by Liz Toohey-Wiese. Photo by Byron Dauncey courtesy of the artist.