Finding Home: A Walk, a Meditation, a Memoir, a Collage Kathleen Vaughan

Oct 15, 2026

A reflective article by Kathleen Vaughan connects living in Toronto with the making of Finding Home, an interwoven work of visual art and text centered on her Bathurst and St. Clair neighborhood. It describes how love for the city informs an artistic process of collecting ideas, selecting, and editing, then presenting a walk-based narrative route with memoir, research, and theory. The discussion links personal experience with environmental and geological history through imagery, drawings, photographs, maps, and collages.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages13

Reading Time20 min

AccessFree to download

Finding Home and Toronto

Love, artistic practice, and selective editing

A walk route and mixed visual-text materials

Research, dissertation context, and an adapted version

Cedarvale Ravine walk and entry point

Finding Home: A Walk, a Meditation, a Memoir, a Collage Kathleen Vaughan I unabashedly love Toronto, where I’ve lived for more than three decades. Two of those I’ve resided in this apartment on the west side of town—close to the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), to the parks and pathways that connect my living and working sites with those institutions and my other haunts. What thrills me most about this city? Its diverse peoples, half of whom were born outside Canada.1 Its neighbourhoods. Its walkability. Its ravines. Leaving OCAD at the end of an afternoon’s teaching, I loved to stroll through the crowds, images, noises and smells of adjacent downtown Chinatown, enjoying the hurly-burly along Dundas Street West, the shapes and colours of the once-unfamiliar fruits and vegetables of the street-side displays, the streetcar’s clang of impatience as it noses through the congested traffic, the sweet, dense smells wafting from the herbalists’ open doorways. I’m also enamoured of its counterpoint: the hipster urban gloss a few blocks south and west along Queen Street (close to my studio), its trendy storefronts filled with artisanal goods, small press titles, fashion victim attire, and some of the best croissants in the city. And most of all, I love the ravines. These ‘surprise’ belowgrade parks, nestled within developed urban neighbourhoods, hug the watercourses that over the centuries have chiseled deep valleys into this city, making Toronto a kind of “San Francisco in reverse,”2 as an architect oncequipped. When you love something as much as I do Toronto, then you make artwork about it. In my practice, art making requires a devoted and voracious accumulation of ideas and options, followed by ruthlessly selective editing, a kind of delicate dissection—this paradoxical form of engagement somehow both bonds you to your subject and holds it at arm’s length. And so motivated by love, curiosity and a kind of anticipatory nostalgia I’ll explain later, I created Finding Home, a body of interwoven visual art and text about my home neighbourhood around Bathurst and St. Clair. This article reflects on the making of Finding Home and includes portions of it. In Finding Home I wanted to offer a reader, a viewer, the gift of the same kind of engagement of Toronto that I appreciate so much—a positive experiential encounter. And so the text was written as a walk along a specific looping route away from and back to my apartment, in the sociable and inquisitive company of my standard poodle, Auggie. The visuals represent the route through both space and time as well as our process of walking it, and include large-scale charcoal drawings, textile maps and sculptures, archival and contemporary photographs, and paper collages. The text is a mix of personal memoir, research, and theory, a collage of urban and environmental studies; education and ethics; art theory and practice; history, geography, and 30 Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 13 (2), 2008 natural science. And of course the text and visual work juxtaposed create a kind of meta-collage, a “remix” of literary and visual/kinaesthetic modes of knowing. Each iteration of Finding Home—versioned in exhibitions and publications such as this one—configures component elements afresh, generating new possibilities for both knowledge and em-placement. I undertook Finding Home to inquire into how a person can develop a feeling of being at home in the world, and to explore the role that creative work—in this case, collage—plays in that process. This research agenda reflects that Finding Home served as the dissertation for my PhD in Education from York University (Toronto) .3 But rather than continue to describe a work that both tells about and shows aspects of my Toronto, let me offer you a version of it, adapted from the final chapter of the text. Here, in the late summer of 2006, Auggie and I, in the imaginative company of the reader, walk th

FAQs

What is Finding Home and what does it focus on?

Finding Home is a combined visual-art-and-text project centered on Vaughan’s home neighborhood around Bathurst and St. Clair in Toronto. It uses a walk narrative to explore how place supports a feeling of being at home.

How does Vaughan describe her artistic process for creating the work?

She describes accumulating ideas through devoted attention, then applying ruthlessly selective editing. The practice is portrayed as a careful, dissecting engagement that both binds her to her subject and keeps it at a distance.

What journey does the adapted narrative in the article follow?

In late summer 2006, Vaughan and her standard poodle Auggie walk through Cedarvale Ravine along a looping route linked to the Heath Street entrance near St. Clair West subway and paths toward Castle Frank Creek.

Oct 15, 2026

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