…..Inuksuit made with 21st century rubble

Colonel Sam Smith Park, on the shores of Lake Ontario, at the south end of Etobicoke was recently extended into the lake with landfill. It is one of Toronto’s newest and largest waterfront parks. Much of the park was created in front of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital and the RL Clark Filtration Plant. The waterfront lakefill area is mainly naturalized with grasses, shrubs and small trees. The shoreline is a combination of rocky headlands, cobble beaches and protected wetland. This blends further north into the mature trees and mowed lawns of the former hospital grounds and now the site for Humber College.

This is the park that Frances, my husband and I walked through every day (when I’m not at the cottage or away). This morning on our usual walk to the point I noticed that there were more pieces of installation art that someone has created, using the bricks and rubble from the landfill along the shoreline.

The sculptures were intended to look like inuksuit, a native stone landmark or cairn built and used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America.

An inuksuk was originally built as a travel marker for camps, hunting grounds, food caches and sometimes burial grounds. For more information about the inuksuk, check the Wikipedia site, here.