Brian Lye doing a light-meter reading before shooting 16 mm film in Frisby Valley. Photo: Genevieve Robertson
by the Rainbow-Jordan Working Group
The first thing you notice is the silence—not the absence of sound, but the depth of it. Beneath a towering canopy of ancient cedar and hemlock the air moves thick like water, carrying the scent of humus and time. Here, every massive tree trunk is an archive, every fallen limb a library of fungi in slow return. This is the Rainbow-Jordan: an ancient inland rainforest still unbroken by road or machine. We went there not to measure or to take, but to listen and ask: What if artists were called upon to inventory wilderness areas threatened by natural resource extraction?
We set out to answer this question in 2023 when we assembled ourselves into the Rainbow-Jordan Working Group—an ad hoc collective of five artists, an ecologist and a geographer. Our focus is the Rainbow-Jordan, a vanishingly rare piece of intact old-growth inland temperate rainforest wilderness in the unceded territory of the Sn̓ʕaýckstx (Sinixt/Arrow Lakes), Secwepémc and Ktunaxa nations.
Genevieve Robertson taking a charcoal rubbing from a cedar in Frisby Valley. Photo: Emily Nilsen
Hidden in two unroaded valleys on the west side of Lake Revelstoke, these ancient stands have persisted in an untrammelled state for millennia, since the retreat of the glaciers, with only rare visits from humans in modern times. In 2018, initial biological surveys of the Rainbow-Jordan Wilderness revealed biodiversity of global significance: an intact expanse of one of the Earth’s last inland rainforests, teeming with lichens, including rare species that have not previously been recorded in the Interior. Hundreds of species of fungi lie hidden under the thick humus of the forest floor until the fall rains beckon their mushroom fruiting bodies. Towering western red cedar up to 1,800 years old are part of a complex mosaic of habitats that support black bears, owls, endangered mountain caribou, bats and other animals. After recognizing this unique biodiversity value, the Valhalla Wilderness Society immediately began a campaign to protect the Rainbow-Jordan Wilderness as a provincial park. Currently these valleys have no permanent protection, and three logging companies hold tenures that would allow them to clearcut in the Rainbow-Jordan.
The Rainbow-Jordan Working Group is currently Jim Holyoak (drawer and book artist), Jonathan Kawchuk (experimental composer and field recordist), Brian Lye (analogue filmmaker and animator), Emily Nilsen (writer), Genevieve Robertson (interdisciplinary artist), Iraleigh Anderson (ecologist) and Devin Bartley (geographer). We are rooted in a shared belief that artist/scientist relationships and exchanges can be symbiotic, and that collaboration is key to growth across diverse fields of practice. While we are in the early stages of creative production, finished artwork will be exhibited at the Grand Forks Art Gallery in fall 2027, and will include sound composition and field recording, analogue film, narrative graphic comic strips, poetry, installation, large-scale immersive drawing and more.
Plein air sketch in Rainbow Valley by Jim Holyoak. Photo: Jim Holyoak
We made a reconnaissance visit to the Rainbow-Jordan in September 2024. The trip allowed interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and provided the artists access to this remote and threatened landscape. We are now in a period of early research/production as we seek funding for our second trip into the forest in fall 2026. Some of the early questions we are considering are: How to produce work that is informed by this unique place, while also topical to general conversations about old-growth management, climate justice and art/science cross-sectoral work? How to build artist-scientist relationships that are based in mutuality and reciprocal exchange? How to translate our experiences in this unique place into art that will be politically poignant and expand upon a simple celebration of beauty?
Rainbow-Jordan Working Group in front of one of the largest cedar trees in Frisby
Valley (left to right): rare plant ecologist Iraleigh Anderson, composer and field
recorder Jonathan Kawchuk, geographer Devin Bartley, wildlife biologist and
campaigner Amber Peters, poet Emily Nilsen, visual artists Genevieve Robertson
and Jim Holyoak and filmmaker Brian Lye.
British Columbia is experiencing a moment of extremely polarized ideas around old-growth management, with several unprotected valleys at the forefront of contention on both the coast and in the Interior. As demand increases for natural resources like timber, and people are increasingly alienated from the wilderness, there have been recent calls to streamline regulatory processes and fast-track the conversion of wilderness into landscapes engineered to support humans. Generally viewed through the lens of natural resource economics, remote wilderness areas like the Rainbow-Jordan are largely invisible to the public and have been left in the trust of a small class of professional foresters, geologists and biologists to survey and describe. These specialists present narrowly scoped reports to a small audience of peers in decision-making roles who manage public lands—a technocratic process that alienates much of the public.
We aim to create a body of speculative art that imagines a world where a wider range of disciplines are integrated into land management decision-making processes. By broadening the frame through which we view the wilderness, we hope to engage a more diverse cross-section of the public into the ongoing dialogues and processes that determine the fates of the remaining wilderness areas. As such, we are developing a collective practice of epistemic rewilding—an unsettling of the boundaries of who is permitted to know a place. Within contemporary land management, the forest often appears only as data: an inventory of timber volumes, species lists and geographic coordinates. Yet forests are not passive matter; each tree is a living archive of reciprocity, written over centuries of exchange between soil, fungi, trees and water. By engaging wilderness through artistic field methods—listening, tracing, filming, drawing—we practise inquiry that is embodied, relational and responsive.
Angel Wings (Pleurocybella porrigens)
This approach extends from the idea that perception itself is political. To see the Rainbow-Jordan through art is to reclaim a commons of perception from the narrow lenses of extraction and bureaucracy, which are rooted in capitalism and colonialism. Acts of deliberate attention become counter-documents: inventories not of resources but of relationships. In this sense, each drawing, film reel or sound composition presents an argument for a wider governance, one where artistic works attempt to interpret and share the voices of cedar and lichen, water and wind, alongside those of scientists.
While working on these unceded lands we aim to observe and record, but not to claim. The Rainbow-Jordan persists within Indigenous legal and ethical frameworks that extend to time immemorial. Our work seeks not to overwrite these relations but to listen in a manner that respects them, to understand that the opportunity to witness is also an obligation to protect.
This project is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Trust through the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
Protecting the Rainbow-Jordan as a Class A provincial park will require a groundswell of public support. The Valhalla Wilderness Society, which has already helped conserve more than half a million hectares of B.C. wilderness, invites you to add your voice through their letter-writing campaign at www.vws.org/action
