Flotsam and Jetsam

An Interview With Kristine Mifsud about natural sculpture at the Spit

—Stéphane Mallarmé EXERPT FROM Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance), 1897

Photographs by Lauren Kolyn

I was thinking about walking the Leslie Spit in winter. I have been going there for a long time and it figures significanly in the epilogue to The Colour of Ink but I was thinking today about my visit there with Lauren Kolyn years back when the beach was all icicled rebar and we were still just getting to know each other. This was before she agreed to make the photographs for Make Ink and in the process helped me to see things through her lens. The still life arrangements arranged by beautiful happenstance. But more than framed still-life images, we were both noticing those moments on a walk when something in the quality of the light or of your noticing, or maybe just in the way a plant is tucked into the landscape, makes a little spotlight appear and an ordinary thing—rock, stick, flower or vine— is reified in the moment to stop you in your tracks as though you’ve stumbled into a little play or church service. Like photography, foraging encourages this. In winter, when there isn’t much alive to collect for ink making and so much colour lies buried under the snow, it’s the metals and minerals that stand out. And what better place to find the human-made, nature-shaped detritus for pigments than on the scrappy shores of the lake where the bricks and rebar of the city’s infill meet weedy hills and beaches rocked smooth by the water that stretches as far as the eye can see out to New York State.

Kristine Mifsud: instal of found pieces for DesignTO 2019

My favourite noticer of the cast-off materials of the Leslie Spit is Kristine Mifsud, a Toronto-based artist who I’ve never met, never collaborated with, and never even corresponded with before a few weeks ago, but whose eye and mind I have been appreciating for years on instagram. I thought I would ask her some questions and share her thinking and world with you. Again it’s an email correspondence with edits for space which I offer to our Colour Lab Members in full. Please do consider joining in support of the newsletter and its research and learn more about Kristine Mifsud’s fascination with copper and making her own tar!