Artists Statement

From Ollywiki

Oliver Kellhammer's botanical interventions and public land art projects attempt to demonstrate nature's sometimes surprising ability to recover from damage.

His work facilitates the processes of regeneration by engaging the botanical and socio-political frameworks that underlie the landscape, taking such forms as small-scale urban eco-forestry, inner city community agriculture, and the restoration of eroded railway ravines. His work is anti-monumental: As his interventions integrate into the ecological and cultural communities that form around them, his role as artist becomes increasingly obscured. The work functions a kind of catalytic model-making, living on as a vehicle for community empowerment, while demonstrating methods of positive engagement with the global environmental crisis.

Most of his recent projects have focused on an area which roughly parallels the main railway corridor that runs through the eastern part of Vancouver, British Columbia. The surrounding neighbourhoods are historically low-income, with the lowest green space per capita ratios in the city. A significant portion of this landscape has been industrialized and the resulting disturbance has created extensive areas of ruderal (ruin) ecologies, from which the artist takes his inspiration.