Gardiner East Dismantling | Mosaic

Hi, my name’s John McKinnon. I am the artist responsible for the Gardiner East Dismantling, the public art end of it. The brief that I received from the city involved devising a community public art program. And within that I had to come up with vehicles for content, so that there would be a sense of ownership for the community. And I feel it was very, very successful and the main aspect of this was the in-ground bronze mosaic comprised of 114 different panels, each weighing approximately 50 pounds of pure bronze, and each one done by a community person located within the South Riverdale area.

And I came up with an idea that we would get people to set up within a workshop format clay tiles, and within the clay tiles people were encouraged to do landscape formats – we provided a variety of ideas and directions for people. We had youth groups, we had families, we had… we went to an old folks home, and so in effect we drew in the broad spectrum of people who lived there and it was very, very inclusive. If you, if you did a clay tile, it… there was no editing process… your tile would then be cast into bronze. After the clay tile was worked on by a community person, then I would cast it into plaster and take the plaster to the foundry to be cast.

There are tiles by professional visual artists, there are tiles made by 5-year olds. And in that sense the casting process democratizes all of the work, so that a professional artist and a 5-year old, or a grandmother, they all have the same visual weight to them. And that’s the best part.

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