Alyssa Schwann

Alyssa Schwann is an environmental artist and designer who for many years taught at the University of Manitoba, Faculty of Architecture, in Winnipeg. Her professional experience involves design in Canada, Britain, and the Netherlands, with projects in North America, Europe, and North Africa. She spent several years at the office of West 8 in the Netherlands as a project leader and designer, with a focus on parks, gardens and public spaces that included high-profile urban design projects for Toronto’s Central Waterfront and Governors Island in New York City.

Growing up in northern towns in Saskatchewan, Schwann became committed to working in community development. She co-directs the Atelier Anonymous Global Landscape Foundation, a self-funded organization specializing in cultural landscapes. In regions such as the Philippine Mountain Province, GLF supports community-led projects relating to indigenous and intangible landscape heritage traditions. As a public policy researcher initiated through a fellowship with Action Canada (2013-14) she has worked with the Government of the Northwest Territories and, with Daitch & Associates, continues to consult with northern tribal governments.

During the last year and a half, Alyssa Schwann has been creating installations in an urban forest in Vancouver—currently supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts—and this past summer on the island of Korppoo in Finland. These temporary interventions, “drawing” with string, continue her ongoing studies in the intersection of “art + ecology”, examining the temporal and formal relationships between land and place. The work is intended as a meditation on an understanding of the need to nurture a deep relationship to place, using the forest—and string—as the subjects.