Thanks to the support of the City of Vancouver Neighbourhood Matching Fund, we were able to run a truly community-collaborative art project this year – Braiding Community.
We partnered with textile artist, Lorna Moffat, who had the pleasure of first meeting in Aug 2024 at the West Vancouver Harmony Arts Festival. At that event she was creating a community braiding project, using upcycled fabric. Noticing how great Lorna was at engaging with a variety of people of diverse ages and cultures, we asked if she would like to partner with us at Free the Fern to create an art piece that would represent our community. Happily, she said yes!
So, in April 2025, at Earth Fest at Everett Crowley Park, Lorna began with public engagement. She asked community members to share words or phrases that describe the community of Champlain Heights. Some things shared were favourite places, events, or things that make our neighbourhood unique.
Lorna then took these words and phrases and wrote them on strips of white fabric. The community were then invited to donate fabric for our project. We gathered the fabric and brought it to our Eco-Arts Festival on June 28, 2025.
Lorna set-up a table at the festival, inviting members of the public to choose a white strip of fabric with a word or phrase and join it together with two other colourful strips, to make a braid.
Following the festival, Lorna wove all the braids together with branches she had gathered from the local Champlain Heights trails. The resulting piece perfectly captures our colourful community and the beauty of our forest.
On July 14, 2025, the piece was hung up in the Champlain Heights Community Centre, just left of the entrance near the stairwell.
