(Re)defining Our Relationship With Nature by Yang Lim

When viewing Agatha Chacinski’s installation work A Grasp for Love (2022) for the first time, people may initially have been struck most by the bright blue wall of painted purple flowers and the colourful plant life residing in the five pot-like structures that were arranged on the grass. However, upon closer examination, visitors noticed that her work did not contain any live plants and that they were, in fact, artificial creations. Each pot also contained a painted purple heart that was attached to the blue wall via a long piece of sturdy rope. 

Chacinski’s work prompted us to contemplate our relationship to nature and the types of authentic connections that we may desire to cultivate with it. The work’s artificiality was heightened by the very surroundings in which visitors experienced it. Surrounded by Churchill Square’s greenery and concrete, visitors would become more conscious of its artificiality, even as they may have been simultaneously drawn to its colourfulness and beauty. Pleasant psychological states associated with nature such as comfort, tranquillity, and rejuvenation may have risen initially when people viewed Chacinski’s work, but these feelings were rapidly tempered in the presence of the actual, living vegetation and grey, impersonal concrete that surrounded it. The artificial plants may have evoked some fascination and attention from people, but they could never fully substitute for the real nature that surrounded it.   

This jarring juxtaposition highlighted the fragility of nature itself and the ease with which human-made structures and semblances of nature can supplant it. With increasing urbanization across Canada, people are becoming increasingly disconnected from the natural environment, such that their relationship with it has become filtered through an urban lens. Fake foliage and flora similar to what was found in this work can be seen in numerous indoor settings such as shopping malls, office buildings, and restaurants, in an attempt to evoke the presence of nature within human-made environments that have paradoxically displaced the natural environments on which they reside for their existence.   

Produced during the pandemic, Chacinski’s work raised questions about how humanity coexists with the natural environment, which has undergone drastic and debilitating impacts at the cost of human “progress” and development. Encouraging people to reconnect with nature in new and different ways, the work’s description asked, “How long will nature need to grasp for your love?” The question is intriguing and deliberate in placing nature at the centre of the conversation, rather than people. Perhaps this is the point, because only then can people truly rethink their understanding of nature and forge an ethical relationship with it that is not defined by its utility, but rather that recognizes its intrinsic value to the world in which we live.