Cease Wyss in conversation with Marc Johnson

Cease Wyss in conversation with Marc Johnson.
Cease Wyss: I'd like to talk about those recent projects I just completed with the gallery 221A and its Pollyanna Library. It's on a site called Semi-public and it is an empty lot situated between two other buildings. One is a residential space and one's a business space. Then it's this empty lot at ground level. I was asked to create a wilded forest space. So, through working with students they hired, and with an architecture student that does landscape architecture, we created beautiful plans to build a little forest between the two buildings and all the mounds. Instead of just putting just solid earth, we put mounds and they're all in Coast Salish form line shapes, like half-moons and circles, two big guys sitting like this, and a flowing walkway between.
Each of the mounds has all Indigenous plants - food plants, medicine, plants, and utilitarian plants - things that can be used for art supplies, tools, or medicine that could be made for healing or food. There are mostly berries on the site, especially because it's a neighborhood where so many diverse cultures go. I knew that by putting in plants with berries that are really common, that people know, then it'll be easy for people to come through and say, "Oh hey, what's this like? Oh, I know this," and be able to bring their families in.
For the circular parts of the eyes, we created kind of a half-moon bench with a cob oven. Cob is mud, clay, sand, earth, rocks and straw. It's all kind of pushed together to create a form. When it dries, it dries very solid and hard and it becomes a really great bench. In this case, we have a bench with an oven. I was thinking about, what do people miss in the city? What do they not have? They don't have an opportunity to have outside fires right? And I figured that this would be a beautiful way to bring people in. They could have a little fire, bake a pizza or a pie, or even cookies, whatever. They could put big or small things that would fit in the oven and just have that time sitting outside, interacting, and eating together. All of those things excited me to think, “That's a gift to the community.”
For the entire project, I've worked with native youths to build the mounds. Then we did a work party with the whole community to build the cob oven and bench. We worked with a really cool collective of female-identifying people called the Mud Girls. They like to make homes from the earth, but they do benches and ovens as well. It's really nice to work with people that love working with whole communities. For a project like that, you need the whole community to come in and tramp the mud and help to carry heavy things and to observe and to have conversations around it. It was exciting.
The other circular part of the garden was a spiral garden. I was really excited about building it because I did a permaculture course a year and a half ago and I really want to build those. Then I injured myself and I couldn't do things on the sites. So, I pulled one of the youths I work with aside and I asked if she could become the lead on the rest of the project. She said, "Yes," and she totally owned it. When I came for the cob oven workshop, she had built the spiral garden on her own with big rocks and lots of earth. I was like, "Wow, you are so dedicated to this work." It excited me that even though I literally had a fall and I got held back, having that element of working with a team and knowing who you can rely on, it means a lot.
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