D&S Projects is a collaboration between landscape designer Katie Strang and visual artist Christine Dewancker. Through D&S Projects, we explore the relationships between the built environment and cultural production, and the psychological effects of space. Our projects aim to inspire imagination, understanding and connection with the places we inhabit, by creating experiences that foreground often-invisible contexts from our surrounding environments.

Katie Strang
As a landscape designer coming from visual art, I am fascinated by the ephemerality of landscape as a medium and the impact green spaces can have on quality of life. Art and landscape architecture share the goal of creating immersive experiences, and being in dialogue with their users. Like designed landscapes, art can be deeply connected to its context. I see landscapes as a type of cultural expression, and I strive to be part of the interdisciplinary work to have our built environment express beauty, sustainability and forethought. I believe people are the cornerstone of urban ecologies, and retain a fundamental desire to be connected to their environments. In this time, creating green spaces that function as practical recreational space, meaningful aesthetic objects, and sustainable components of a living city is a responsibility for designers.

Katie holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto, and a BFA from Queen’s University. She works as a landscape designer and arborist in the Greater Toronto Area.

CV available on request.

Christine Dewancker
As an artist, I am concerned with the positions artists occupy within society and the potential art has for social change. Through my work I look at systems inherent in production and circulation and the effects that cycles of construction and reproduction have on our relationships to materials and place. I am interested in the physical and psychological effects of the spaces we occupy; I consider how our constructed environments inform our experiences and relationships with each other, what produces our public consciousness and how is this created and reproduced by our everyday activities. I have a multidisciplinary approach to making my work and use a diverse range of media, as well as found objects and imagery.

Christine holds a BFA from Queen’s University and recently completed a post-graduate certificate in Arts Administration and Cultural Management.

CV available on request.