D'Andrea Bowie: cut a path through the weeds and call it a garden

October 10, 2026 - January 2, 2027

Image credit: courtesy of the artist, D'Andrea Bowie.

D’Andrea Bowie’s sculptural practice is driven by experimentation and an interest in how materials behave and transform. Working with plaster, cement, clay, copper, glass, and stone, she engages with materials extracted from the earth that have long been used to construct the built environment. Through casting, forming, assembling, and other processes of transformation, Bowie considers how these materials carry traces of touch, labour, geological history, and human intervention, drawing attention to our relationship with the land and how we reshape it.

cut a path through the weeds and call it a garden takes its title from a shift in Bowie’s relationship with the rural property where she lives and works in the Whitchurch-Highlands. Rather than continually mowing the plants growing there, she began cutting paths through the overgrowth, creating new ways of experiencing the landscape. In an area where farmland increasingly meets suburban development, this simple act of reframing what constitutes a garden reflects a broader impulse within Bowie’s practice: to reconsider familiar materials and surroundings through sustained observation and engagement.

Reception: Saturday October 17, 2026 from 2:00pm to 4:00pm

About the artist: D’Andrea Bowie is a visual artist and educator based in the Whitchurch-Highlands, a rural area on the northern outskirts of Toronto. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the alchemical potential of extracted world-building elements, framed through an eco-feminist lens that resists anthropocentrism and foregrounds reciprocal relationships. Located at the threshold of farmland and encroaching suburban development, Bowie’s practice is deeply informed by a sustained engagement with place as both agent and archive. Her work investigates the entangled relationships between land, body, and material through intersecting lenses of race, gender, capitalism, and settler colonialism—forces that simultaneously constrain and shape material conditions and meaning. 

Responding to an independant and adventerous spirit, Bowie left her religious family at a young age to work and travel throughout Europe. Starting her own family gave her the stability and confidence to persue an education in the arts. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University while raising her children, receiving numerous scholarships and academic awards throughout her studies. Bowie holds a Master of Fine Arts from York University, where she received the SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS-M) and the Susan Crocker and John Hunkin Award in Fine Arts. Her work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council and presented in a range of contexts, including group exhibitions, community-based initiatives, and alternative outdoor sites. She has held solo exhibitions in both public and commercial galleries, most recently Winter Wheat at The Goldfarb Gallery. She is a sessional instructor at York University.