Windsocks

As you stroll through Downsview Park, keep an eye out for the colourful windsocks fluttering at our entrances. These aren’t just decorative, but they’re a tribute to the Park’s aviation history. Once an active army base and aircraft manufacturing site, we played a key role in Canada’s aviation legacy. You can even spot miniature models of the planes once built here in our lookout. The windsocks, traditionally used by pilots to gauge wind direction and speed, are a reminder of that past. Today, we have 10 windsocks around the Park. 

They are themed for special occasions such as Canada Day and Pride Month. We’re especially proud to showcase a unique windsock that celebrates both Pride and National Indigenous History Month, created in collaboration with a local artist. 

Title: Wind that Carries Us

This title speaks to the ancestral, queer, and collective ways we move through the world — sometimes held gently, sometimes with force, always in motion. It gestures to how wind, like memory or story, moves across bodies, time, and land, carrying survival, kinship, and transformation.

Design Description:

Wind that Carries Us is a visual invocation of queer Indigenous kinship, presence, and transformation. The design moves from deep blue waters at the base to radiant sun at the top, evoking a journey from earth to sky, from memory to becoming. A single feather — floats upward through currents of stars, droplets, and plant forms and medicines guided. Along the way, glowing paw prints mark presence and passage, connecting human, animal, and spirit realms. This work draws from Anishinaabe visual storytelling and cosmology, holding space for both softness and strength. It honours 2-Spirit and queer Indigenous life as fluid, embodied, and always in relation — to land, ancestors, kin, and movement. It’s meant to be seen in motion, catching the wind like breath, like story, like survival.

Artist Bio:

Natalie King (she/they) is a queer Anishinaabe (Algonquin) interdisciplinary artist, curator, and facilitator living in Toronto and a member of Timiskaming First Nation. Their practice moves across painting, digital media, murals, installation, and community-based work, centering themes of Indigenous sovereignty, queer love, cultural reclamation, and embodied memory. King’s vibrant and layered visual language offers reflections on survival, kinship, and joy, grounded in deep connection to land, spirit, and community.

This vibrant blend of history and art is on display throughout the Park. See if you can spot all ten windsocks!