JP King is an artist-educator with a special interest in discard culture, creative systems, and visual communication. He currently teaches within the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, in addition to the Integrated Design program at the Haliburton School of Art + Design. In 2016, the Canada Council for the Arts nominated King for a Governor General's Innovation Award based on his research about how waste shapes the world.
Lives in Toronto. Born in 1985.
My Positionality
My work is shaped by the position I inhabit, and I want to name it plainly. I am a white settler in Canada. I have financial stability, and I’ve benefited from some family support and a number of generous scholarships, grants, and funding packages, forms of access that many people never receive. Those conditions have afforded me time, education, and professional mobility, and they shape what I’m able to build.
I am also neurodivergent, and I live with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory autoimmune arthritis. These realities influence how I work, the rhythms I need, and the kinds of environments where I can do my best thinking. They have also made me attentive to invisible strain, capacity limits, and the quiet ways people get designed out of systems.
My Buddhist practice has further shaped my orientation. It’s less a personal identity than a training in attention, interdependence, and ethical responsibility. It keeps me wary of certainty, interested in suffering and its causes, and committed to practices of care, not just ideas about care.
Because of this mix of privilege and constraint, I try to hold my work with humility. I aim to collaborate in ways that increase agency rather than dependence, to cite and compensate knowledge appropriately, to avoid extracting stories or labour, and to build structures that others can adapt and carry forward. I am still learning. I will get things wrong at times. My commitment is to listen, to repair when needed, and to keep widening the circle of whose knowledge and whose futures are being designed for.
My Ethical Stance
I work in service of life. Not only human life, but the wide and entangled continuum of beings: the visible, invisible, charismatic and the overlooked, the fragile and the enduring. This orientation demands that I question the assumptions that underpin so much of modern civilization: that progress is linear, that intelligence is human, and that the world exists to serve our needs. I no longer see these as truths, but as powerful stories that may need to be unlearned.
My work begins where the myth of human supremacy ends. I seek to cultivate practices that decenter the human and open space for the voices of other species, systems, and intelligences. I believe that to design, imagine, or build anything in our time requires an ethics that is ecological; one that recognizes our co-implication in every web of life we touch. Whether through learning systems, cultural design, or creative research, I aim to nurture the conditions for care, reciprocity, and regeneration.
I take a post-political stance not out of indifference, but because I see that our crises are civilizational rather than partisan. The work ahead is not to win arguments within a broken framework, but to construct new frameworks for being human within the living world. To imagine is not enough; imagination must take root in the body, in daily practice, in the relationships that shape what we do and how we do it. I believe imagination becomes powerful only when it is embodied.
I hold hope not as a promise of better times, but as a discipline of attention. I hold a commitment to notice the beauty that persists, to amplify the small gestures of repair, to rejoice in the marvel of the living world even amid its unraveling. My work is as much about wonder as it is about critique.
Ultimately, I seek to work in right relationship, with clients, collaborators, and ecosystems alike, through honesty, humility, and care. For the purpose of my work is not to fix the world, but to learn to live within it responsibly, joyfully, and awake.
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