Project Description
Magnetic Sympathy is a research-creation project that brings together Garry oak galls, ink-making, drawing, and psychometry to explore relationships between matter, memory, and multispecies communication. Formed through interactions between gall wasps and oak trees, the galls become both materials for artistic production and points of contact with the lives that shaped them. The work asks how these small structures might be approached as records of habitation, transformation, and ecological connection.
Informed by my practice of Squirrealism, the project extends my exploration of communication with squirrels to gall wasps. Intuition, touch, and chance guide encounters with materials during foraging and in the studio. Through psychometry—the practice of seeking intuitive impressions through contact with objects—I attend to images and sensations that arise while holding the galls. My participation in the University of Saskatchewan’s 2023 International Multispecies Methods Research Symposium, within research directed by M.J. Barrett, provided a context for developing this approach through Intuitive Interspecies Communication.
Central to the work is the possibility of matter as an archive. Historical accounts of psychometry imagined objects as holding impressions of the beings and events around them, suggesting a world in which encounters leave traces beyond what is immediately visible. Magnetic Sympathy takes up this proposition as an artistic inquiry. The vacated gall becomes a point of connection with an absent inhabitant, inviting speculation about what remains after a body has departed and how touch might open another way of attending to that presence.
Magnetic Sympathy approaches thought transference as an experiment between two participants: the gall wasps and me. It begins with the proposition that objects absorb traces of the beings that encounter them and that an oak gall might retain something of the wasp whose life it sheltered. Through touch, I attend to the possibility of a reciprocal exchange: that our thoughts might affect the materials around us while those materials, in turn, act upon us. Matter becomes a kind of astral photograph—a daguerreotype preserving impressions of the lives and events within its vicinity. Perhaps nature is therefore the most accomplished portraitist, composing across the material universe an ever-expanding archive of all that has taken place.
Material experiments developed through an exchange with artist Christi York, using vacated galls collected from the Garry Oak Meadow Preservation Society nursery. York transformed the galls into ink, which we each explored through drawings of stones and rock formations. The movement from gall to ink to image connects an established material tradition with the ecological relationships that make it possible. A substance formed through the activity of an insect within a tree becomes a medium through which further impressions are recorded.
Across these experiments, the gall appears as shelter, trace, and drawing material. The recurring stone forms bring another register of time into the work, placing insect life, plant growth, and geological duration in relation. Magnetic Sympathyconsiders how an image might emerge through encounters among species and materials, and how artistic authorship changes when attention extends to the lives already present within the medium.
Photos by Carollyne Yardley. Garry oak galls created by gall wasp on oak seedlings.
Photo by Christi York. Mortar and pestal with oak galls. Instagram @york_christi
Photo by Carollyne Yardley. Oak gall ink made by Christi York.Instagram @carollyneyardley
Photo by Carollyne Yardley Instagram @carollyneyardley Untitled, Garry oak gall ink on paper, 2024.
Photo by Martin Gisborne Instagram @martingisborne Indelible, Garry oak gall ink on paper, 2023 via Chrisi York Instagram@york_christi.