Artifact:

Orchard by artist Diane Borsato

TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON

Diane Borsato is an artist who admits that “for the past few years, I’ve been making things that hardly look like art.” Instead, she describes her creative practice as a chance to explore, deeply, her “obsessive nature preoccupations.” She’s worked with bees, clouds, mushrooms….and now she’s branching out to apples.

For an upcoming project, Borsato is creating an urban apple orchard at the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga. On this decommissioned, contaminated, ex-industrial site, where real-life Bomb Girls made weapons for war, Borsato is doing the long, slow work of cultivating rare, unusual, and historic apple varietals. “These are cultural artifacts, they’re precious,” she explains, relishing the eccentric and evocative names that carry decades of meaning and agricultural wisdom: Sleeping Beauty (bright red on the outside, pure white on the inside), Pink Pearl (red fleshed), Pineapple Reinette, Winter White Pearmain, Pixie Crunch…

Borsato’s curated, deliberate collection of old varietals, grafted from apples kept alive by orchardists over the years, is a testament to values inherent in small-scale, local tinkering: waiting, hoping, waiting, hoping…

She asks, “Can you think of a sculpture better than a tree?”

For more information, visit www.dianeborsato.net.

TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON, WHO WRITES ABOUT NATIVE PLANTS, URBAN AGRICULTURE, AND RELATED ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES.