Now’s no time to quit ‘Planet Love’ collection sends the message it’s not too late to save the Earth By: Eva Wasney Posted: 4:41 PM CDT Monday, Oct. 23, 2023

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This article was published 23/10/2023 (740 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The climate crisis is often captured in photos of wildfires, floods and human suffering. As an artist and lifelong environmentalist, Hannah Godfrey was interested in showing a different version of events.

“I noticed that a lot of the (climate) events that were happening were based around anxiety and grief — those things are extremely important, but I was finding I was getting overwhelmed,” says the curator of the Buhler Gallery at St. Boniface Hospital. “How can I make something that people will want to engage with that will bring a kind of joyful energy?”

The answer was Planet Love, a multidisciplinary collection of colourful, uplifting work from a diverse group of 20 Manitoba-based artists.

“It’s showing what we can save,” says Godfrey, adding that the exhibit is a response to the sentiment that action is futile in the face of such a significant existential crisis. “This is to remind people that, no, it’s not over, we can still do this. It’s going to be really hard and everybody needs to be working on it in their own way.”

Many of the paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, textiles and poetry included in Planet Love don’t explicitly deal with the climate crisis or the natural world. Instead, Godfrey focused on building a show full of artwork that spoke to themes of love, hope and action. The planetary connections followed naturally.

Godfrey points to Colleen Cutschall’s piece — a print featuring stylized bison heads entitled The Race Between Four Leg and Two Leg — as an example.

“(It speaks to) the relationship between humans and non-humans and the very human-centred way our politics and social structures are formed,” she says. “I don’t even think it’s tangential; there’s a relationship between these beings on the planet and the situation our planet is in at the moment.

“In the same way that everything is political, everything relates to the planet,” she adds.

In addition to the exhibit in the Buhler Gallery, Godfrey has placed brass plate etchings of five of the artworks at locations around Winnipeg that have a connection to climate policy, conservation, education and community. Visitors are invited to bring their own paper and pencils to take rubbings of the plates installed at St. Boniface Hospital, the University of Winnipeg, FortWhyte Alive, the Millennium Library and the Artspace building in the Exchange.

“Art and culture are an essential part of changing the story around the climate crisis,” Godfrey says of why she chose the latter location. “Artists are very important in creating narratives of hope and narratives of action and courage.”

The exhibit also includes weekly “climate hope circles” for hospital staff and volunteers to discuss their feelings about climate change and chart a course of action. It’s part of Godfrey’s ongoing work as a climate coach — a certification she pursued through the U.K.-based Climate Change Coaches organization in response to her own eco-anxiety.

“It really gave me a sense of hope and purpose,” she says. “(The coaching) is about figuring out what people’s values are and then helping them relate that to a goal they might have for taking action for the climate. It’s like a Venn diagram: what makes you happy? What’s really important to you? Here’s the climate crisis: where do they intersect?”

Visit pathfinding.coach for more information of Godfrey’s climate coaching work.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @evawasney