Does Land Run Home: Holding Ground (Sarah Comyn and Cait Hurley)
Does Land Run Home, Holding Ground (Sarah Comyn and Cait Hurley), 2024, 2 minutes 57 seconds, eco-processed super-8 film. Produced out of Activating Pigeon Park Project in collaboration with Gallery Gachet, Vancouver Park Board, and Holding Ground
Screening on the Gachet Community Screen until June 21, 2025
In the summer of 2024, Gallery Gachet collaborated with the Vancouver Park Board, Holding Ground (formerly Hives for Humanity), and Pigeon Park artists and residents on a two-month program of events titled Activating Pigeon Park: A Community Curation Project of Roots & Resilience. The project invited participants to engage with Pigeon Park’s enduring history as a vital community hub and to collectively consider how we might interrogate who the city is for—by taking up space with our bodies and manipulating the fabric of urban architecture.
In partnership with Holding Ground, artists Sarah Comyn and Cait Hurley led a sensory workshop that encouraged attentive seeing and deep listening through the medium of analogue Super 8 film.
The final film, Does Land Run Home, borrows its title from a collective poem created during our garden writing workshop, composed on handmade sprout paper. The film traces the social geography of Pigeon Park through the whizzing of bikes, trees swaying in the wind, and the repeated return to the Survivors Totem Pole—around which people gather, orbit, and rest. In capturing the everyday motions of the park, the film gestures toward the layered civic, urban, and social justice movements embedded within its landscape.
Later, the film was eco-processed in the Healing Garden at 117 E Hastings using a chemical-free, plant-based developing method. Participants harvested materials for the developing solution, handled strips of analogue film, and worked together—mixing, detangling, and animating the film into being. The marks and scratches that flicker across the celluloid surface reveal the many hands that shaped this collective work.
Sophia Santos English,
Programming & Volunteer Coordinator
Plant potion ingredient list:
Luis: rustica tobacco, fireweed leaf, quadrivalvis tobacco & seed, fireweed flower.
Sophia: mint, fireweed leaf & fluff, kinnikinnick, salmonberry leaf, quadrivalvis tobacco leaf.
Alia: rustica tobacco, fireweed leaf, black elderberry.
Rianna: mint, rustica tobacco
Daniela: fireweed flower, red flowering currant, red & golden raspberries, Joe Pye weed, flox, goldenrod, blackberries.
Karen: fig fruit & leaf, Joe Pye weed, fireweed flower & leaf, quadrivalvis tobacco.
Sarah: nettle tips, kinnickinik leaves, cedar tree leaves, rose, fireweed.
Solveig: alata tobacco flower, red flowering currant.
Holding Ground is a collaborative project of Cait Gentle (Gentle Geographies) and Sarah Comyn (Time & Times)—emerging from the compost pile of Hives for Humanity (2012-2024), a community-serving non-profit which was grown alongside the Healing Garden at 117 East Hastings Street, on the shared, unceded, ancestral and occupied territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
