Bend in the Bow Objectives

The land that maps out Bend in the Bow has a rich, diverse past. This area has been in flux for centuries, carving out a story of Calgary’s past, present, and future. Storytelling is used as a way to unite people and place, building meaningful connections between us and the world around us.

The Bend in the Bow Public Art Plan is inspired by thinking about how Calgary’s culture was shaped by its environment, how industry modified its natural landscape, and the role of conservation in managing natural and cultural history for the benefit of future generations.

Three core values have been identified for Bend in the Bow: nature, culture, and education. The project strives to maintain the balance of nature and culture; and to educate and inspire future stewards to conserve the habitat and heritage of these parks for tomorrow’s citizens and wildlife inhabitants. Like the Bend in the Bow landscape and its users, the three core values are fluid systems. The art envisioned for Bend in the Bow will support, enrich, and reveal these dynamic values.

Bend in the Bow will conserve, protect, restore and enhance the environmental value of Bend in the Bow’s terrestrial, aquatic and riparian habitats for future generations. The site’s systems are in constant motion and flux. Bend in the Bow will improve the environment’s resilience to change by working harmoniously with its systems. The central guiding principle of Bend in the Bow, including its future artworks, is to highlight the habitat-forming processes operating in the area and work with these processes as they function in the landscape, allowing them to act more freely to create a dynamic, heterogeneous ecosystem.

Art can tap into this flow, working to catalyze, develop and reveal processes that generate healthy and dynamic ecological systems, allow flora and fauna to thrive, and tell stories about conservation efforts at work on the land.

Bend in the Bow will recognize, conserve, restore, reveal and celebrate the site’s enormous cultural significance and the role it has played in The City and Province by incorporating themes that reference its uses over time. Art can bring meaning to the place by expressing the landscape’s shifting exchange of culture and nature.

Today, educational centres represent the primary cultural use at Bend in the Bow. The site has evidence of early use by First Nations, which should be further investigated as the project develops. It also includes the preserved family homestead of Colonel James Walker, an early leader in the establishment of Calgary. William Pearce, his contemporary and another civic visionary, occupied and developed a parcel of land north of Walker’s. Starting in the 1880s and over many decades, Walker and Pearce worked the site with their experiments and innovations in industry and agriculture. Colonel Walker started Calgary’s first sawmill and conducted horticultural experiments. Pearce built an early irrigated farm, where he conducted tree trials. In more recent times an oil refinery and the subsequent remediation work that followed it left traces on the site.

Art at Bend in the Bow should incorporate cultural stories of the place. Stories narrated through art can thread together different times, jumping between historic, contemporary, and future moments.

Bend in the Bow will be a place to learn about and foster appreciation for the intrinsic value of the site’s natural systems and cultural legacy. The open space system will engage a diverse, multi-generational audience by implementing a variety of experiential and interpretive projects and methods combining science, engineering, heritage, art, design, interpretation and innovation. The interdisciplinary approach of this way of teaching is critical to reaching and empowering a wide range of citizen stewards from both current and future generations who can manage the land in appropriate and relevant ways.

Environmental literacy is an educational strategy practiced by The City of Calgary. It is a cyclical model, where participants are both teachers and learners. Active engagement with place engenders the knowledge, skills, and perspectives necessary for the development of a balanced environmental ethic that can guide collective sustainable development of the land.

Traditional Knowledge Keepers also have much to share on traditional science and ecology and should be engaged in the process of developing art and engagement opportunities for Bend in the Bow.

Art can initiate active engagements with place at Bend in the Bow through the production of immersive environments and events that reveal the poetics of place by offering tactile, phenomenological, and embodied experiences that arouse curiosity and prompt discovery, bringing people closer to the dynamic natural processes and cultural heritage shaping the land. Through this occurrence, deep and lasting learning will occur.

includes the incorporation of programs to educate people about conservation. Bend in the Bow must balance programming that preserves habitat and culture on this particular piece of land (conservation on a local scale) with programming designed to move future generations to preserve not only this property but also large swaths of land elsewhere (conservation on a regional, national and global scale). Both types of programming are critical components of Bend in the Bow. In many cases these two scales of conservation will overlap in their methods, but in some cases one may have to concede to support goals of the other. Finding a balance is an essential part of the Redevelopment Plan.

Nature and culture are human conceptions. They are a way of classifying and understanding our world and together form a network of dichotomous and parallel relationships with each other. The educational component at Bend in the Bow bridges its natural and cultural conditions.

Art is a critical component for disseminating all three values. Art provides a lens through which visitors can perceive the world around them with wonderment, inquisitiveness, and reverence. Through art, ecology and history will transcend their scientific and informational characteristics and assume social, psychological, poetic, and imaginative dimensions that facilitate transformative experiences and meaningful connections with the natural and cultural landscape.

This document summarizes the vision, guiding principles, opportunities, and conditions for creating public art at Bend in the Bow and also includes an analysis of the site and its context which inspired the vision and should continue to inform the development of individual artworks resulting from the plan.

The art planners conducted research, reviewed relevant planning documents, visited the site multiple times, and attended a series of meetings with stakeholders and the public to better understand Bend in the Bow’s natural, cultural and educational conditions, its community, and its various places and the stories they tell. Working as part of the design team, they developed goals for art’s role at Bend in the Bow and outlined a framework of projects that can honor and cultivate the core values of nature, culture, and education, especially as they relate to habitat forming processes.

Art opportunities identified in the Public Art Plan include integrated, embedded, stand alone, and ephemeral works. Sensitivity to the unique environment through artworks that have a light touch structurally and formally and use materials appropriate to their location will be critical to the success of the resulting art. Like the landscape, the art must be dynamic and ephemeral enough to respond and adapt to changes in environmental systems. The more the art can contribute to fluid processes the more value it will add to Bend in the Bow, both functionally and poetically.

Not all of the projects need to be implemented to convey the philosophical vision, as every project should inherently touch on all of the core values to some degree. As site-specific work that emerges from artists’ deep studies of the site, the art collection is envisioned as a series of overlapping stories about a similar group of events, all recounted by different storytellers. The varied perspectives of the diverse artworks will, as a whole, convey a multi-faceted interpretation and experience of Bend in the Bow, gaining even deeper nuance with the unique perceptive fields brought by each person experiencing the work. Together the artworks will form a full spectrum of stories that form a cohesive narrative supporting the goals of the Bend in the Bow Redevelopment Plan by illuminating the core values of nature, culture, and education.