Holding Our Breath
Lara Felsing, Holding Our Breath, Recipes for Climate Disaster. Wildfire charcoal, pinecone and fireweed pigments and up-cycled paint on a recipe card, 2026.
Lara Felsing
Project Room
September 15–November 21, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, September 12, 1pm-3pm (RSVP)
ARTIST STATEMENT
This fire season, thousands of wildfires have burned worldwide. Lara Felsing’s exhibition, titled Holding Our Breath, investigates the increasing prevalence of wildfires as summers continue to grow hotter and drier. The title Holding Our Breath is drawn from the experience of living with poor air quality from extreme wildfire smoke and the collective anxiety felt while wildfires burn.
This body of work is made with wildfire burn-site castoffs, flagging tape, harvested plant-dyed, up-cycled textiles, and secondhand items from Lara’s community that have been altered to reflect the increase in wildfires and their connection to drought, rising global temperatures, and the burning of fossil fuels. Sculptures and textile pieces are combined not only with forest castoffs and secondhand materials, but also with photographs taken during the wildfires in Alberta where she lives. They reference the windows she looked out of before and after evacuating, as she documented the shifting sky for signs of safety and danger.
Holding Our Breath takes place at the end of the 2026 fire season. It invites conversation, sharing, and reflection on where we are, where we’re headed, and how we proceed amid wildfire, wildfire smoke, and the climate emergency.
Lara Felsing is an interdisciplinary Cree Métis artist from Northern Alberta, Canada, and a registered member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. Her material practice and research are approached with ‘two-eyed seeing’, with one eye looking through a lens of Indigenous teachings and the other through a lens of Western knowledge.
Lara’s practice responds to the stories happening on the land where she lives and beyond. Her work investigates climate change, community, and kinship towards the land and more-than-humans. Her practice addresses the increasing prevalence of wildfires, including sharing her experiences evacuating from her community twice in 2023. She creates an ecology of artwork that reflects the power and knowledge embedded in the land, and shares the message of acknowledging our connection to the natural world for our survival and the health of the land and more-than-human species with whom we coexist.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This exhibition is supported by the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund of Queen’s University and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.