Learning With the St. Lawrence

Since July 2025, I have worked as a research assistant on Learning With the St. Lawrence, a SSHRC-funded project led by Dr. Kathleen Vaughan at Concordia University. The project asks how artists, researchers, and communities can come to know a river by spending time with it. Within it, I lead workshops that use scientific illustration as a way of paying attention to the river and the life it carries.

My first workshop for the project came at Mess and Methods: Experiments in Environmental Ethnography, the 2025 Summer Institute. There I introduced students to scientific illustration as a field method, a way of recording what you notice in a place and noticing more because you are recording it.

Fieldwork has taken me to Cornwall, Ontario, where the Moses-Saunders Power Dam spans the river. Beside it, an eel ladder lets juvenile American eels climb past the dam on their way upstream. Seeing it makes clear that the St. Lawrence is a managed system as much as a natural one. Even an animal that crosses an ocean depends on a ramp built into concrete.

That visit shaped the workshop I led in October 2025 at Changing Waters, the River Institute’s 32nd Annual River Symposium. Participants drew the American eel from close observation, tracing the anatomy that carries it through a migration of thousands of kilometres. Drawing an animal slowly is one of the few ways to really see it, and few people ever see an eel. The workshop treated illustration as shared inquiry rather than technical instruction: a room of scientists, educators, and residents looking closely at the same animal together.

In August 2026, I served as a judge for Marshland Memories, an art contest hosted by The Great River Rapport. Judging other people’s images of the river’s wetlands was a reminder that the project runs both ways: it teaches people to look, and it gathers what they have seen.

The project shapes my teaching and my research equally. It is where I test what observational drawing can do outside the studio, in public, and in relation to a specific place.