Alchemists

Giving back to community through art and food

We are all familiar with the translated proverb, ‘It take a village to raise a child’ believed to originate and existing in African cultures, and used by many globally. It does indeed take a village, something that can be applied to many things in life. In this case, it takes a hamlet, but it also takes a willing community and the fortitude of a few good people to make a difference in the lives of others, especially when those individuals are strangers and often don’t even speak the same language. With the darker, shorter and cooler days of November upon us, the harvesting of grapes in the many vineyards dotting Prince Edward County is complete for another year. Of course, work doesn’t stop as the vines still need to be tended before winter. But inside, the process of wine making has already begun now the laborious task of picking and processing the jewel-like fruit is complete. At the centre of this story are the seasonal agricultural workers, or the temporary foreign workers as they as sometimes referred. They play a significant role in ensuring the precious and valuable crop is not only successfully harvested each and every year, but tended and nurtured throughout the entire growing season.

This story is about looking beyond the obvious, digging a little deeper and reaching out, recognizing and acknowledging the hard work of those individuals and the role they play in the bigger picture. It’s about recognizing the countless steps involved, not only in making wine for folks to drink, but how vital the seasonal agricultural workers are to the success of many County wineries as well as the local economy. Without these types of workers, many County wineries would cease to exist. These individuals come from afar, usually Mexico, and are distanced from family for months on end. They spend the growing season here putting in long hard working days so they can earn income to send back to their families thousands of miles away. By many accounts, 2021 was an excellent growing year for the vines and the crop appears generally superb in its quality, but it was also another COVID year which continues to bring challenges on many fronts. “There is this notion that making wine is a romantic thing, and people just generally don’t understand what goes into this beautiful glass of wine they are holding in their hands, the hard work behind it and the creativity behind it,” says Claire Tallarico, Alchemy Artists Residency founder.

Two people also from away arrived in the hamlet of Hillier five years ago where they slowly established themselves in the community and began to make a difference in the lives of others. It’s a community where they reside only part of the year, temporarily putting down roots yet giving back to a community they find themselves now quite attached to. Claire Tallarico founded Alchemy Artists Residency in Toronto, but it was only five years ago when she discovered the County and when she and long-time collaborative partner Tonia Di Risio began offering a traditional artists residency here. “Even though we didn’t know the County, we felt it was the right place to offer artists the opportunity to come for a certain period of time and have the time and space to do their work, but also in a community of other artists,” explains Tallarico.

“The reason this residency exists is really to look at the synergy between people’s artistic practices, whatever medium they work in, and the growing, cooking and sharing of food.”

She says Hillier was the right place to bring artists, “to explore a small community and work in response to it,” but she also talks about how everything fell into place and conspired for them to come here as far as finding a place to stay, meeting other artists (sometimes by chance), making connections, and having people willing to work with them and support the work they chose to do here.

“There is something about Station Road, there was something about Hillier, something about the trail and the sunken forests, just something that was really was appealing and people were amenable.” The result was the Alchemy Artists Residency sprouted in Hillier in 2017 and continued on in 2018 and 2019. Tallarico describes how they first started to get to know some winemakers and farmers. “We started to understand a little bit more about how what we were doing was exploring a place and exploring people’s interest in how food and art intersected in a community, so we came back a third year,” she explains. “We started spending a little more time scratching the surface and understanding the community was not just the people that we had met, but it was the people behind the scenes, like the seasonal agricultural workers who make all of this possible,” she says. “Because we liked this place, we were trying to understand what was so special about it, and we recognized how hard people worked.”

“We did three years of very traditional artist residencies all up and down Station Road and probably over that period of time we bought about 35 artists from different parts of the country and different countries to Hillier while still offering some programming in Toronto and on Toronto Island.” The hamlet of Hillier not only welcomed Tallarico and Di Risio and their artist friends, but because it’s such a tiny place, it meant the artists would be able to live and work in close proximity, something that was important to Tallarico. “We wanted them to be able to walk back and forth between the houses and the studio spaces because in that first year, we didn’t have a studio and we didn’t know about Hillier Hall and so people were in barns and porches and kitchens, and outside too because we had some plein air painters.” In the first year, Tallarico says people were curious of the different presence in the hamlet. The following year, they applied to use Hillier Hall as a studio space. “People were very curious that artists would come from Europe or the States or other parts of Ontario because of Hillier.”

In 2020, Alchemy were planning to return to Hillier for a fourth year until COVID-19 changed everything. The plan had been to take a break from having a traditional residency and to work more closely with the community. “We had some ideas of things we wanted to do to bring artists together with more of the local community and then COVID happened, so we had to abandon that plan.” It was a conversation she and Di Risio were having one day with winemaker Keith Tyers at Closson Chase Vineyards that made an impact. “He was talking about the fact that he couldn’t do what he did without the workers who came from away and we hadn’t really thought about that before.” She talks about a building on the corner of the property that looks like a church and asked him about it. “He said that’s where some of our workers are housed.” They came away from that conversation unsure what may come next and what ideas may bubble up, especially given COVID restrictions at the time, but Tyers offered use of the kitchen at Closson Chase and therein the seed was planted. Part two of the Alchemy Table Settings story follows next week.