Pages from the slow notebook.

There is no single recipe for living soil. Each blend reflects a conversation between intention, place and season. As ingredients are added and transformed, the soil develops its own voice. The recipe is never truly finished; it continues to evolve with every root, rainfall and passing season. The soil below is where it all began, during our stay at Las Nubes, York University's campus in Costa Rica, in the spring of 2023. A planned visit to an organic farm led our class to this farmer, who was making special soil recipes to combat pests organically. I was hooked on messages in the soil from this moment.

Petrichor is often described as the scent of rain, but it is more accurately the scent of life returning to our awareness. As rain disturbs the soil, compounds produced by plants and microorganisms become airborne. While the microphones cannot capture this fragrance, they remind me that every rainfall activates countless conversations occurring beyond human perception. Some are heard. Others are smelled, felt or simply imagined. If petrichor could be seen, this image of moonlight over Bass Lake would be how I imagine it. Farmers of Costa Rica all agreed: their favourite smell was rain on soil.

The flowers reach toward the light while their roots remain hidden in darkness. One cannot exist without the other.

Soil teaches that not everything essential is visible. Growth begins out of sight, nourished by countless relationships beneath the surface. The practice of listening asks for the same trust: to attend to what cannot yet be seen, measured or fully understood.

This image reminds me that there is another way to meet a place, not by walking through it or documenting it, but by becoming still within it. For a few quiet moments, Ian's body echoed the shape of the shoreline, the snow and the winter sky. The landscape was no longer a backdrop; it became a participant. That realization would later shape the way I approached the soil: not as something to study from a distance, but as something to encounter with humility, presence and care.

I shot and edited the music video below for Ian North's song Antarctica, in which I also sing harmonies. We filmed it on Bass Lake in February 2025, a few months before SoilScapes began to take shape as a research project. Looking back, I now recognize this work as evidence of creative seeds already taking root. 

The themes of stillness, attentive observation, seasonal change and relationship with place were present long before I had the language to describe them. Antarctica reveals that the evolution of SoilScapes began not with a research proposal, but with a creative practice that was already teaching me how to listen differently. 

Singing harmonies has also taken on new meaning for me through SoilScapes. Harmony depends on listening while contributing something of your own. As I assembled this portfolio, I began to recognize that the same relational quality appears throughout the project, in the conversations between sound and place, between people and landscape and between the many works that now make up SoilScapes.