An offering of Dreamcatchers and medicine bundles, installed at a Toronto ‘homeless’ encampment.

A medicine mobile featuring objects captured in tiny glass bottles suspended between trees at The Bentway urban park.

Medicine Mobiles opens honest conversations about engagement in community, honouring space, experience and memories, while confronting discomforts with entering environments that we wouldn’t call our own.

Olympia Trypis calls herself “an artist who doesn’t like labels, and identifies as a human who is trying to live and create in harmony with earth, which is our home.”

Olympia spent most of the artistic practice phases of the project at her trailer on her family’s Northern Ontario property, going on material supply runs through the forest, where she would find artistic prompts in carcasses, bones, feathers, stone, birchbark, pine cones and more. She seemed in deep conversation with her finds, crafting with them almost 24-7. The reported generosity she experienced in her wild foraging is responded to with a commitment to reciprocity in Olympia’s art practice, in which she often engages community and family members, aunties and elders, in making things to give away. This reciprocity was amplified in her final production involving medicine bundles and a large scale mobile of dreamcatchers installed at a west end ‘homeless’ encampment, and another medicine mobile installed at The Bentway.

Olympia’s intention in offering over 17 dreamcatchers and medicine bundles to residents of the encampment was that they take the installation apart to bring these gifts into their individual tents. We followed Olympia’s lead at this site, because she had friends who lived there and had personal experience with homelessness. We were warmly welcomed by Grizz, who had been there since losing his daughter in April. Inspired by the installation, which he hung directly beside his dwelling, he gave Olympia a large circular frame he had found and promptly commissioned her to create a large-scale dreamcatcher with it. She accepted. He showed us his own formidable art collection, some by himself and some by folks that had spent time in the encampment. His easel was situated behind the outdoor communal kitchen in which Olympia conducted an interview with residents, about what they wanted to communicate about being there, about place.

This installation opened honest conversations, questions and concerns about positionality, ethics of engagement in community, and honouring space and experience, as well as confronting our discomforts or fears of entering environments that are vastly different than our own. One artist/researcher said it felt like he was in another country, and felt like ‘the colonizer’. Deep respect was garnered and the group subsequently decided to create art supply kits to take to the encampment, as a way of staying connected and offering thanks, demonstrating generative cycles of reciprocity.

Olympia is on the curatorial team of Reconstructions of Home – part of the Making with Place Public Art Projects 2021 for ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art.

Stay connected to Olympia’s work here.