Fieldwork is a public art installation renewed each season in a field near Perth, Ontario. The field is owned by farmer and ceramic artist Susie Osler, who has long been interested in how art could be created as a gift rather than a commodity.

Each season a new artist installs a work in the field. The public is welcome to visit and to occasionally interact with the works, several of which are described below by the artists.

“The field was chosen because it is an open space that runs alongside a dirt road,” said Osler. “Surprise, delight, curiosity, and wonder are all important responses that we are trying to engender in people who drive, bike or walk by.”

Philosophically, part of the motivation for Osler and contributing artists is to overturn the idea of art as commodity.

“As a maker of ceramic objects destined for purchase, I wanted to break out of the relationship between maker and consumer,” explained Osler, “and find a way to essentially give away an artistic or creative impulse, particularly to people who are not usually engaged with art.”

Also of interest to the artists are the arising intersections between nature and culture, urban and rural embedded in Fieldwork.

“The field itself is neither entirely natural—it has been cleared, cultivated and managed over more than a century—nor entirely a fabrication,” said Osler. “Conceptually, I like this. I like the linguistic suggestions, too: culture, cultivation, cultivated …”

While Osler reports that viewers are sometimes confused by what the Fieldwork artists are doing or showing, “Overall, people really love the surprise of stumbling upon the work in the field—and returning to the field to see what is happening.”

The project started out with a core of Ottawa-based artists, but the most recent contribution is from Toronto's Barbara and Real Eguchi, while Swedish ceramic artist Henny Kjellberg will install a work this winter.

The launch and development of each project is documented online at www.fieldworkproject.com.


Summer 2008: Chris Osler

spec-u-late

Heritage wheat, galvanized steel, iron, plexiglass, simulated security cameras







A tiny crop of heritage wheat, growing in a highly secure, enclosed space, spec-u-late aspired to trigger questions about the current global food crisis, the dramatic rise in commodity prices and the security issues that increased food insecurity creates. As commodity markets such as wheat, corn and rice become flooded with an influx of capital fleeing from other sectors of a turbulent global financial system, the very foods that sustain the majority of the world’s population have become suddenly and increasingly unavailable and unaffordable. spec-u-late sought to highlight the divisions that lie between producer and consumer, between stakeholder and disenfranchised, between people and their experience of food production.

With a variety of heavy rains, which pounded the meager stalks of wheat that emerged, we were thankful to see any of the crop last through to harvest. With support of family, weeds were pulled and wheat stalks were propped up again. In the end, the wheat persisted beyond our doubts and the disparate weather. A bucketful of wheat was harvested.

As the first installation of Fieldwork, the spec-u-late succeeded in garnering quizzical looks and multiple drive-by glances. The piece became lovingly named “what-the-fuck?” as neighbours and passersby took in the unusual sight. People stopped in to walk around or sped through with their vehicles, some peeling out, around, and in between the piece and the interpretive signs, leaving tracks behind to indicate they had been there.



Winter 2008/09: Susie Osler

Winter Gestures/Beacon Whispers

Mound, audio tape, snow bales / Dead tree, ceramic flowers, assorted objects







Winter is a season of death, stillness, pause, reflection, quiet. It tends to incite a retraction or withdrawl from the world, a shift to the internal, a hibernation, a rest. It also is the period of regeneration, recuperation, a preparation mentally, physically, and psychologically for rebirth in spring. It is the time for analysis. It is introspective. These are some of the aspects of the season that I was trying to suggest in this installation.

Gestures that responded to the weather and the psychological space of winter happened when I felt moved or compelled in some way to perform them. They included building a mound (like a stockpile), shoveling a path across the field to the mound (and keeping it shoveled through the winter), huddling in a snowstorm, audio taping me making a snow angel on a bright day, and rolling ‘snow bales’ with seeds at their core. Many of these gestures were photographed and posted on the blog along with my own observations.

The Beacon (a dead tree I’d been eyeing down the road) was installed just before the ground froze and, something like a shrine, it started accumulating things. These things were stand-ins for thoughts of gratitude and inspiration. I imagined these thoughts being whispered like spirits, or one’s internal voice.

I added ceramic flowers to the Beacon each day. Other people mailed things to me, or stopped and added their own things (including poems written on birch bark, photos, amulets, prayer flags). It was fabulous to see The Beacon accumulate this potency that comes with collective participation.



Spring 2009: Erin Robertson

Heavenly Blue

Terracotta warrior seeded with morning glories






History of war and classical mythology is a world that consumed my once scrawny, asthmatic bookworm of a brother and consequently our household.

Standing very still while he practiced ninja kicks around my head, I recall having better things to do but was warned that should I move I would throw off his precision and be annihilated.

Six black belts and centuries of battles and braveries later he embodies the honourable warrior of the legends he devoured.

I am at once awestruck and repelled at the brutality and courage required.

Out of personal interest and in attempt to decipher fraternal codes I wonder what’s really going on?

Fieldwork Summer 2009: Barbara Flanagan-Eguchi and Real Eguchi

Hares & Squares
Invasive / Beauty, Series Four

Painted plywood cutouts






The project takes its form in two-dimensional, oversized lawn ornaments. The lawn shadow is a form of folk art and is generally painted black. Hares & Squares imitates this common folk art but creates contrast through the use of bright colours. It encourages us to be more attentive to the local landscape.

The Jackrabbit or European Hare is non-native to southern Ontario. It is believed that Jackrabbits are descendents of captive hares imported from Germany that became feral in the early 20th Century when they escaped from a farm near Cambridge, Ontario.

The squares, icons of urbanism, are unnaturally placed in this rural setting and mimic signage boards that interrupt our view of the picturesque countryside. In this instance, the squares appear to be tumbling and off balance, dancing in harmony and in counterpoint with the hares.

Hares & Squares is positioned at the edge of the field and intersects with the road. The road and the field are engaged by, and form part of the artwork, and in so doing, we are reminded that the road, field and indeed, most of us, are in essence foreign. Where we enjoy refuge, we must guide our actions with appreciation, humility and respect. The road provides access yet forms a boundary. How do we recognize when we have traveled too far beyond our boundaries, especially the limits of our place in nature?



Fieldwork Winter 2009/10: Henny Linn Kjellberg, Sweden

Freedom to Roam

Simulated barbed wire fencing (black ceramic and iron wire)

Every time I visit North America, and specifically the U.S., the private property signs and the lake sites where you have to pay an entrance fee always surprise me. I am aware of the fact that the systems of taking care of land are different in the two countries—things provided privately in the U.S. are in Sweden always taken care of by the municipalities or counties through taxes. Still, it feels so unnatural to me that a person can't walk in the woods freely but has to ask for permission to ski through a forest or pay to swim in a lake! Or, if doing so, feeling badly for passing through some one else's land even though that owner might be living 300 kilometers away.

In my Fieldwork installation I will use the symbol of barbed wire—the coils used on fences and the ground at for example border crossings—but build my own slightly altered, freer and more stylized version out of dark, black ceramic pieces and iron wire. The length will ideally be between 8 and 13 meters, the height between 50 and 100 cm and the placement quite close to the road that passes the field. The plan is to install this work in late fall or early winter, and during the winter the dark silhouette of the piece will stand clear against the white snow background. Not fencing in an area, but just being there, as a statement.