On Earthing & Petrichor

"on earthing and petrichor" is a risograph-printed exhibition guide designed for CAPSULES Artist Resources, a Toronto-based non-profit studio space addressing the city's studio affordability crisis. The publication accompanies a multidisciplinary group exhibition featuring the work of Kristi Chen, Oreka James, Phuong Nguyen, Chiedza Pasipanodya, Deepikah RB, Erica Whyte and Jenny Vong, curated by Roya DelSol.

The exhibition positions the natural world as a space of respite, rooting, recuperation and regrowth, and the publication design reflects that sensibility. Risograph printing, with its characteristically layered, slightly misregistered ink and limited colour palette, lends the guide a tactile, organic quality in keeping with the exhibition's engagement with earthing, petrichor and the symbiotic relationships of the natural world.

The guide moves through a series of texts, artist works and curatorial writing that together ask how a connection to nature engenders a belief in a better world. It includes a clockwise, spiralling list of works, excerpts from Alexis Pauline Gumbs' "Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals" and Bedour Alagraa's "The Interminable Catastrophe", personal reflections on landscape, weather and wonder, and a lyric from Chronixx's "Love Is On The Mountain".

The design holds these varied registers together, moving between the intimate and the political, the scientific and the poetic, giving form to an exhibition that sets the aliveness of the natural world against the rise of fascistic violence, climate change and economic distress, and finds in nature a model for collective resistance and regrowth.