WORKING GROUND  

An exhibition by Noah Scheinman and the Belle Park Project 

This exhibition brings artworks produced in and about Belle Park into dialogue with the space and collections of the Miller Museum of Geology.  

The 44-hectare triangular park was once a wetland linking what we now call Belle Island with the west shore of the Great Cataraqui River. Since time immemorial, the wetland sustained networks of plant, animal, and human life before it became the site of Kingston’s municipal landfill from 1952 to 1974. Since then, it has served as golf course and park, and it is currently a fragile home for unhoused people.   

Situating local history within broader planetary frameworks, Working Ground invites reflection on how landscapes are made, altered, and represented across various overlapping practices and timescales: geological, ecological, cultural, economic, and experiential. In art and in the museum, in the landfill and in resource extraction, ground is worked: worked on, worked with, worked over, and worked through. Both materially and conceptually, the ground grounds the exhibition.  

The project also stages a dialogue between two kinds of disciplinary ground. At geological timescales, Belle Park’s artificial strata barely register, its layered sediments compressed into a thin, undifferentiated deposit. Yet at human and ecological scales — the typical domain of archaeological and cultural history — this is a site of divergent experiences and profound transformation.      

Working Ground is thus a proposition for reorienting ourselves in space and time. Engaging artistic, museological, and environmental registers, it proposes a method where depth is not only spatial but temporal, and where the surface is not the limit of imagination but a starting point for multisensory encounters with the earth’s fluid, ever-shifting layers.  

Exhibition Development: Noah Scheinman, Laura Murray, Dorit Naaman | Project Manager: Lea Mauas |  

Graphic Design: S.E.D.I.M.E.N.T.S. 

Working Ground is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and was developed with the generous support of the Miller Museum of Geology, and the Department of Geology and Geological Sciences at Queen’s University.   

Special Thanks: Linda Tsuji, Jack Fitzgerald, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre