Nicole Cormaci and Lara Haworth: Woodhaven Customs and Border Patrol (WBCP)

Biographical Note: Nikki Cormaci
Nicole (“Nikki”) Cormaci is a performance artist currently residing in Washington State where she works at the Sou’wester Artist Residency Program.

Biographical Note: Lara Haworth
Lara Haworth is a writer, visual artist and filmmaker. Her visual work has been exhibited internationally at places including Yokohama, Japan, Toronto, Canada and Chemnitz, Germany. Her poetry has been published in magazines including Visual Verse, Biography, LAKE, ACME, Nōd and Feels. Her new film, All the People I Hurt with My Wedding, was commissioned by Don’t Google It and launched on the platform She Does Filmz in April 2021. Her debut novel, The Straits, is represented by Jo Bell at Bell Lomax Moreton, and she recently finished writing her second novel, Monumenta. In October 2021 she was commissioned by Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios to write Drowning in a Sea of Love, a play text for Tour de Moon 2022. She lives in London, UK.

The Woodhaven Eco-Art Project is a University of British Columbia Hampton-funded series of artistic events unfolding in Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna throughout 2010 with the permission of the Regional District of the Central Okanagan. This performance, staged in the autumn of 2010, created a faux Woodhaven border patrol service, “designed to protect Woodhaven’s borders and defend Woodhaven against those that would do it harm.” The artists recreated an international border station with uniformed guards, visa forms, signs and maps on the edge of Woodhaven Nature Conservancy, a 22-acre bird sanctuary in the Upper Mission of Kelowna, British Columbia. Woodhaven Customs & Border Patrol (WCBP) was a collaborative art project developed by Nicole Cormaci and her then-partner and fellow MFA candidate, Lara Haworth, as an interactive critique of the separation between wilderness and civilization and an interruption of the experience of recreation in nature. The project was the basis of Cormaci’s 2012 MFA thesis done at the University of British Columbia, “Between Longing and Belonging: On the Border of Woodhaven Nature Conservancy.” It was also the topic of Haworth’s thesis “Woodhaven Customs and Border Patrol: A Performance Between Two Solitudes.”

Materials include uniforms, border crossing forms, digital images, video and audio files, notebooks, and master’s theses.

• 1 Project Information (Masters Theses): 2012 – 2013
• 2 Training Manual with Log Entries (1): 2010
• 3 Training Manual with Log Entries (2): 2010
• 4 Training Manual with Log Entries (3): 2010
• 5 Training Manual with Log Entries (4): 2010
• 6 Project Ephemera: 2010
• 7 Submitted Forms: August 24 – October 23, 2010
• 8 Submitted Forms: October 24 – November 24, 2010
• 9 Images and Video: 2010
• 10 Press Materials: 2010

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