The Art of Arctic Plants: A Conversation with Zachari Logan

This essay on Zachari Logan’s botanical art is the sixth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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Tundra plants form clumps and cushions that carpet the landscape. In Kinngait, located in south Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island), they grow in stairway crevices, along structural supports, between water tanks and buildings, and along the stream running parallel to the road. At the shoreline, this botanical abundance draws to an abrupt halt. Rocks and boulders, tangled with kelp, fish bones, and the occasional animal carcass, create a loose divide between land and water. During the sea‑ice season, this boundary disappears as ice renders everything nuna (land). Though plants do not grow on ice, algal blooms might color the subsurface in spring-like greens and pinks, forming the foundation of food webs for invertebrates, fish, seabirds, and marine mammals.

Zachari Logan’s Kinngait (fig. 1) brings the unique, “eruptive carpets” of Kinngait to life. Logan has built a career from drawing plants, transforming real and imagined botanical forms into composite worlds. As the first official Artist in Residence at Kinngait Studio in eleven years, he spent two weeks working alongside Inuit artists and printmakers, including Niveaksie Quvianaqtuliaq and Salamonie Ashoona.

Embodied Botanical Knowledge

Logan’s Kinngait drawings in graphite, charcoal, and colored pencil reveal a studied intimacy with local plant life. Although meticulous, his drawings do not mimic scientific illustration. Instead, they demonstrate an attentiveness to both drawing as practice and plants as collaborators.

In an interview with White Hot Magazine, Logan described this orientation as rooted in interconnection and what he calls “queer rewilding,” refusing a separation between the human body and land. His work is grounded in empirical observations he made through walking, watching, and collecting. Logan’s “queer rewilding” resonates with theories of queer ecology and “botanical eroticism.”

Depicting the Tundra

Much like the desert, where flora “are sparse and ephemeral,” tundra wildflowers offer a “seduction of color.” During the spring and summer, purple saxifrage (the most northerly flowering plant), pretty pink moss campion, and fluffy Arctic cottongrass transform the tundra landscape. These plants, like sea ice algae, hold together food webs and color the Arctic a prismatic palette.

Logan’s psychedelic reimagining of tundra plant life in Kinngait (fig. 2) echoes these seasonal transformations. And as many locals noted during his exhibition at the Kenojuak Community Centre in the final week of his residency—later exhibited again as part of his retrospective exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto—they call to mind the work of local artist Nicotye Samayualie (fig. 3).

Across drawings on paper and textiles, stonecut and lithograph prints, and ceramics, Logan’s many botanical conjugations from Kinngait materially entangle human and plant worlds.

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A Conversation with Zachari Logan

Overlapping with the autumn equinox, I met the Canadian artist Zachari Logan on my fourth visit to Kinngait. We recorded this interview in the weeks following Logan’s residency. In what follows, Logan reflects on Kinngait’s plants, the binary between weight and weightlessness, intimacy, and how weeds and wildflowers, plants often overlooked in art, find common ground in the drawn and printed picture.

Isabelle Gapp: What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think back to your time in Kinngait?

Zachari Logan: I would say, simply, the boundless beauty of the far North and its people (in Kinngait at least), who are inexhaustibly in love with it—their home.

I cannot tell you how many times I came into the shop in the morning or after lunch and found someone sharing a photograph or video of a bird, a particular light, or an icescape as if they’d never seen it before. The wonder held for place is truly inspirational and uncommon.

This is coming from Saskatchewan, a place where many who live there often complain about the cold, the “boring” landscape, how short the summers are, and on and on. Personally, I don’t feel that way about my home province. I tend to love the landscape, sky, and weather (although, as most Canadians do, I’ll gripe about it!). I really loved being in a place where its beauty and uniqueness were cherished.

I find myself recalling the ever-changing daily light that brought about continual shifts in color and texture. This light and shadow I caught from time to time in photographs, but like anything visual, it really does require physical presence to fully get.

I’ll revisit this in upcoming drawings through my recollection of it. It will be a way to further process my experience—my instant wonder with Kinngait’s textures and lines, its weight and weightlessness.

I’m thinking of a drawing I made during my residency that was on view in Toronto, Kinngait No. 3 (fig. 4), in which I used both graphite and pastel in an entirely new way to describe the texture of rain on flat and jagged rock. This I want to explore on a much larger scale, as it also felt like an exploration of, as I mention above, weight and weightlessness.

IG: Watching you work on this drawing in the studio, witnessing the black paper being worked up with black pastel, and then the graphite transforming this void-like space into something with so much detail and depth, was incredible. That day in Kinngait, you described it as “drawing back in.” I love this idea of re-making something visible.

I can’t help but think of the climate and weather in Kinngait—those crisp, cold days with bright, blue skies where the air is so fresh, or when the northern lights move so fluidly, weightlessly, through the sky.

This idea of weight and weightlessness relates to both a space, an environment, and a work of art: a drawing. Could you reflect more on this binary of weight and weightlessness? How do you think about physicality and subject matter in your practice?

ZL: I’ll preface this by saying I’m trying not to sound either obscurant or precious, but Kinngait has a dynamism that is dreamy. The light is particularly intense, as is the dark—not only the dark of night, but also when daylight skies darken. There’s a constant shifting.

There are strange couplings too… When it’s particularly foggy, it’s often quite windy. When bright, it feels heavy, as though the light shares everything visually in a way that is new to me.

Trees are completely absent from this landscape, and it makes the textures, colors, and contours of the ground so much more present. The undulation of the land and the rock formations are the dominant features here. They feel both flowing and supple, yet also jagged and rigid. And the particular foliage adds another layer of enchantment. It is furry, fluffy, and coyly poking out like eruptive carpets.

This sense of weight and weightlessness seemed to be everywhere, in everything. Part of it was, of course, my experience of a new place—one markedly without trees, where wind feels different than other places I’ve been—and rock is everywhere. It becomes a defining feature.

The ceramic work (fig. 5) is a translation of multiple versions of Kinngait: multiple days, feelings, smells, movements, and textures. Although not kinetic, the whole ceramic composition has a mid-motion sway; it recalls my description of the flora as “eruptive carpets.” The color I chose (a concocted mixture) is somewhere between things: wet rock, dead foliage, fur, dark water, 4 A.M. sky, and chimney smoke (among other things, I’m sure!).

IG: How did you find the physicality of working with stonecut under the guidance of Qavavau Manumie (fig. 6)?

ZL: I was so honored and fortunate to have had this experience. To be guided by Qavavau through this process for the first time was incredible. The sheer “objectness” of carving—its physical demands, the rolling and pressing of the ink to exact a color for each pull—all of it satiates my constant need for drawing to extend beyond the frame, to be multidimensional on its surface but also in its presentation.

Drawing is so deeply linked to our bodies as well. There is an intimacy to mark-making that, for me, is usually mediated directly by my fingers onto the surface (especially when I’m using pastels). At times, large compositions cause my fingers to bleed because of the constant rubbing and grinding of pigment onto and into the drawing’s surface.

IG: One of the other things I find so wonderful about the drawings you made from your residency is that many of the plants you drew you had encountered and gathered in the short walk from the A-frame, where you were staying, to the Studio (fig. 7). There is an intimacy and familiarity to this, both in the act of gathering and closely studying, and in the idea of drawing plants that you regularly passed and, in many cases, could just as easily have trodden on.

As someone who is usually obsessed with big open skies, you had me transfixed by the ground! What did you expect to find, plant-wise? Were there any surprises, or did it feel familiar?

ZL: I have always been attracted to drawing, painting, and sculpting botanicals for various reasons. Plants are everywhere; they sustain life as we know it. They are indicators of many things, and human history in relation to plants is fascinating to me.

I often picture plants in relation to the self or as stand-ins. I think about plants as figuration, at times pictured naturalistically, with levels of integration or morphing with the human form. I also use modes of abstraction and decoration as a visual strategy to explore plants in relation to the personal and idiosyncratic.

My particular use of “weeds” and “wildflower” species relates to how we, as a society, speak about and characterize them. Why is a weed a weed? It’s deemed so because it has no human consumptive purpose. These plants are relegated as castoffs or discardables.

Similar language is often used to describe queerness and sexual/gender difference. So, for me, these plants and the marginal spaces where they thrive become metaphors for queer resilience and the defiance of monocultures.

Whenever I am in a new place, plants are what I seek out first, like an anchor. I’m looking for familiarity and for new or previously unknown forms (to me).

I loved the forms of plant life I “discovered” near my residence on daily walks and in between. I had been told before arriving that there were no trees and that it was rather barren, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was different, to be sure, but not barren; that’s a complete mischaracterization. I attempted to get at this new experience, this difference, and relay it emotively as well as honestly in the drawings I made while in residence.

IG: To conclude, could you speak a little to the process of curating and exhibiting these works? And, what is next?

ZL: It was a wonderful and slightly terrifying experience to share the work I had just completed on site over those few weeks. The pieces I made there were a distillation of thoughts, ideas, and emotions about Kinngait, a place the people in attendance have known for a lifetime. It was also a place I had only recently been introduced to, so I was certainly wondering what they might think of what I had created and whether it reflected anything they might recognize.

By the time my project in Toronto at Paul Petro Contemporary Art opened, a month had passed since the residency. That time allowed me to think about the drawings and present them to a broader community, including people who might have no experience of Kinngait or the far north. It was a completely different situation, but I was equally interested in how someone who had never been there, or someone who had been there only as a visitor, might experience these works. I wondered what they might recognize or what they might see as very different from their own experiences.

As for what comes next, I plan to expand on the smaller works I made during the residency, both in scale and in concept. I have the framework for a large landscape-based drawing on a monumental scale that will evoke both the materials I experimented with and the imagery I encountered.

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Featured image: A section of Kinngait, lithograph on blue paper, 15 ¾ x 22 ½ inches, by Zachari Logan, 2025.

Since this interview, Logan has completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and at Peacock Studio in Aberdeen, where he has continued the material experimentation he began in Kinngait. He is currently longlisted for the Sobey Art Award 2026.

Zachari Logan is a Canadian artist working between drawing, ceramics, painting and related installation practices. As an extension of his studio practice, Logan has attended many residencies, including Vienna’s Museums Quartier MQ21 Program, Wave Hill Botanical Gardens Winter Workspace Program in the Bronx, and the Tom Thomson Shack at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. He has received several awards, notable the Lieutenant Governors Award for emerging artist (2014), an Alumni of Influence Award from the University of Saskatchewan (2015), and was long-listed for the Sobey Award (2016).​ He is currently long-listed for a Sobey Award (2026). Works by Zachari are found in private and public collections worldwide.

Isabelle Gapp is an art historian who writes and teaches at the intersections of landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change around the Circumpolar North. She is an Assistant Professor and Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen, where she also serves as Co-Director for The Centre for the North. She is the author of A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930. Website. Instagram. Contact.