The Leslie Street Spit Project: A five year journey tracking the creative instinct

Clarissa Lewis

In this article I will be talking about the interplay between the human psyche and our surroundings as it exists in urban locations. Using the example of 'The Leslie Street Spit' in Toronto Canada, I will take you on a virtual visit to a playground for the creative instinct.  By the time we finish, I hope that I will have assisted the 'Leslie Street Spit' in transporting you by metaphor expressed; by mystery and by an infusion of wonder. I like John Berger's notion that it might be possible to find heaven by 'lifting up something small and at hand…as small as a pebble' (Berger, "Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible")…or could it perhaps also be a bit of rubble?

This will be a journey to a heaven, a temenos. I will try to bring you as close as possible to experiencing what I do as I fall further and deeper in love with and in awe of 'The Leslie Street Spit'.

I ask you to suspend judgment. We will not consider who is qualified to be called an artist nor will we define what constitutes art. In this context that will be irrelevant. What I will be sharing with you is the witnessing of creative instinct at play. It springs from the infinite depth of the unconscious – mysterious and linked to the divine. In this instinct, human beings are more alike than different.

Read the full text of The Leslie Street Spit Project.