Community Fellow, Garden Path Community Health and Wellness

Community Scholar

Visit personal website

Click here to send email

Paul is an artist from Canada who works with image, story, myth and theatre in collaboration with people from communities affected by civil disorder, natural disaster, poverty and social dislocation. He schooled as a visual artist and performer in the Apparitional Theatre of the Chong in Toronto in the early 1970’s. In 1983, he co-founded the Spiral Garden at the Hugh MacMillan Rehabilitation Centre (now Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital) for physically challenged children.

In 1994, while working with the Centre for International Health at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and local partners in Sri Lanka, Paul signed on as creative advisor for the Butterfly Peace Garden in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, which subsequently became the model for three other gardens in Sri Lanka: Kokku Veedu (The Crane’s Nest) and Silandi Veedu (The Spider’s Nest) in Batticaloa and Kalabala Bindu Garden in Hambantota, as well as the Mango Tree Garden at Sweet Mango Pagoda in Sre Knong Village in Cambodia. The Butterfly Peace Garden has been cited in the U.S. Congressional Records as a “Best Peace Practice” with war-affected children. He received an Ashoka Fellowship in 2003 for his work in Sri Lanka.

While the Peace Gardens focus on children, related Centres for Contemplative Art (Monkey’s Tale Centre in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, Step-by-Step Studio in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, La Palais des Rats) provide social outreach and enterprise opportunities for young adults with trauma-related issues and developed programs to empahsize reconciliation through the healing power of nature and art. Step-by-Step Studio offers programs in Mayachitram (“Mystery Painting”) with handicapped veterans at the Mihindu Seth Methura rehabilitation facility as well as for street children sheltered at the Vajira Sri Children’s Development Centre in Colombo. They offer Mystery Painting lessons for survivors of domestic abuse living at the Nisala Diya Sevena in Negombo.

Paul has written a collection of stories based on the lives of children he met during his twenty years with the Butterfly Peace Garden of Batticaloa called Small Wonders. This is the first of a three-part compendium of Garden Path teaching and practice called the Summa Ludo Logica. The other two parts of this synthesis of philosophy and practice are a survey of Garden Path history and pedagogy called Beautiful Nonsense published in 2018 and a toy-based teaching syllabus called Playing for Real commissioned by the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University, was published in December 2022.

At present Paul lives and works in downtown Toronto at the Falling Sky Studio collaborating with friends at Garden Path Serendipity Inc., a non-profit dedicated to furthering ideals of social harmony and wellbeing through cultivation of the arts with disadvantaged youth.

You may also be interested in...